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- \section{Privacy and Relationships}
- Fortunately nowadays seems that the discussion for the right to privacy it is not dead. After the recent events that mainly involved leaks on how the NSA is collecting data, legally and illegally, on all the digital communications, new discussions and questions have been arisen not only in the world of activism, but also, at least to some extent, in the general public.\\
- But usually all these discussions have a very limited scope in some sense, talking of this or that \textbf{technological issue} with the most popular platform for instant messaging, but do not cover the real problem, that is establishing whether and at which extent privacy (in our case privacy related to the online, or in general technological, presence of the person) can be seen as a fundamental right for the individual.\\
- We can find a really interesting perspective in this direction in a not so recent research, made by \textit{James Rachels} in this paper\cite{privacyimportant}, published something like 40 years ago.\\
- What I really find so interesting and important about his thesis is the idea that what we as individuals share with other people is what defines the relationships that we have. He says that the fact that we feel so intimate with another person (for example in a relationship of friendship or also in a romantic one) is given by the \textbf{degree of information} that another person has on us, and obviously also by the degree of information that we have on the other person. The differences between this level of \textbf{common knowledge} between two or more individuals is what differentiate the relationships that we have.\\
- I completely agree on this point of view, and I also find that is somewhat reasonable and embraceable, since we can experience in everyday life that the level of intimacy that we feel with another person depends in great part on the aspects of each other lives that we \textbf{share or not}. Just as an example I think that we can agree that one would not share with a simple colleague worries about his own health, but probably he will share them with family members or intimate friends.\\
- Of course we may have objections to this kind of point of view, but in his paper \textit{Rachels} tries to respond to them, in my opinion in a reasonable and convincing way.
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