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Comment by lancebeet | Hacker News Reader

You state this distinction as if it's established, but it's not a definition I've personally heard explicitly stated before. If I read the introduction of the Wikipedia article on "privacy", I find the following:

>The right not to be subjected to unsanctioned invasions of privacy by the government, corporations, or individuals is part of many countries' privacy laws, and in some cases, constitutions.

So according to Wikipedia, at least in some cases, privacy is protection against the state. Where does your definition come from?

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If there's a court order from due judicial process, isnt't it sanctioned invasion of privacy?

Sanctioned by the state, which the right to privacy should protect you from. The fact that your country habitually violates your rights doesn't change anything about the fact that you have a right to them.

In every country's laws, there are limitations to rights and situations where rights can be lawfully broken.

Obligatory George Carlin quote:

"Your rights? Right this way."

> unsanctioned invasions of privacy

GPs definition might as well come from wikipedia.

Their breakdown is what’s parroted up and down comment chains on this site when it comes to privacy/anonymity, so I’m frankly not sure how you’ve missed it over the years.

That, and the terms themselves tend to invoke clues about the meaning. Privacy implies there is an identity, but it is kept hidden. Anonymity implies there is no identity established so there is nothing to hide.

We don't see much of the latter since most web services require an email to sign up, at minimum, which still leaves discoverable bread crumbs. The web services that require you to give up nothing to use them are far less popular, so I guess I can see why people might conflate the two.

I'm not sure where you're drawing your implications from, but that is not implied, to me. I frequently see the concept of privacy applied to situations where an entity isn't required to ID themselves for the sake of privacy.

The common description when contrasting anonymity vs privacy is that anonymity allows one to do things publicly without being ID'd while privacy allows one to do things without the public having knowledge. There is no implication or requirement that the private party has been ID'd by another other entity.

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