So for your examples, I would say yes, yes through its rules and actions the government has clearly shown that it thinks it owns those things. Including our bodies (drug war anyone?). And a business model that pays for organs is not "unjust" but maybe a bad idea for those that would participate, obviously. I mean, the way you phrase that makes it sound like they're going to be kidnapping poor people in the streets to steal their organs if there wasn't a law against selling organs, which doesn't make sense.
> Also I can still give facebook all my personal data. Simply facebook need to get my consent to distribute and sell it and I will forever have some basic control on what data fecebook has on me. The government has little to do in this.
So long as the government doesn't force companies to provide the basic control, that's how it seems like it should work! (:
> I mean, the way you phrase that makes it sound like they're going to be kidnapping poor people in the streets to steal their organs if there wasn't a law against selling organs, which doesn't make sense.
My understanding is that figuratively speaking that is almost what happened with subprime loans.
Corporations and market can have a lot of power in performing predatory tactics. If drugs were simply legal quite a few business would sustain themselves on other people addictions.
One of the main reason we need regulations is that any sensible and obvious law (like not kidnapping people to harvest their organs) has loopholes (like keeping people poor, ignorant and devoid of mobility (lack of education, criminal convictions etc.)) so that they will agree to sell their organs.
Organ harvesting is a deeply extreme subject and obviously will not happen with or without regulations, but modern free society need are built on the free enterprise (eventually in the public sphere) of individuals and consequently they need to handle when individuals gather too much power and can destabilize societies.
Every free society has this problem (including bitcoin with a 51% attack) and needs to find a solution to both promise rewards for personal enterprise and incentives not to abuse the system (for bitcoin (IIRC) they are respectively money and loss of hardware investment)
> So long as the government doesn't force companies to provide the basic control, that's how it seems like it should work! (:
(interpreting as government should not force companies)
My problem with that is that principles do not help us distinguish fair competition from predatory unethical behavior. In the contest of personal data and privacy that is relevant as we live a completely different universe from just a few years ago.
Gossip is not illegal, but if you were magically able to listen to every conversation in a 10 km radius that would be a problem. Legal and illegal are often linked to how hard it is to do something and the scale at which you can do it.
> Also I can still give facebook all my personal data. Simply facebook need to get my consent to distribute and sell it and I will forever have some basic control on what data fecebook has on me. The government has little to do in this.
So long as the government doesn't force companies to provide the basic control, that's how it seems like it should work! (: