This work aims to analyze how humanistic ideas about private life have been transformed in the modern world. Philosophers John Locke and Thomas Hobbes formed traditional ideas about the inviolability of private property and personal life. Locke’s ideas about private property formed one of the major amendments to the text of the American constitution (Kanatli, 2021). Considering how these ideas have been transformed in the digital age, one can understand how far society and official institutions have moved away from these theoretical calculations.
The social contract is Hobbes’s theory that the state is necessary for people in order to make their life full and safe. In the context of the widespread surveillance of private information on the Internet by American intelligence agencies, the traditional ideas of humanism seem distorted or wholly violated. Interviews given by Google and Facebook officials at the beginning of the last decade make it clear that the Internet has a full list of rights to information uploaded by a person (Weinberg, 2018). In the context of a social contract, this violation of rights can be explained by the voluntary renunciation of them by people in the name of their own security. However, it is obvious that initially the Internet was positioned as a space not only for socialization but also for privacy (Cloud, 2018). The very fact of round-the-clock monitoring of people through devices and social networks was initially, hidden by the state, which accordingly cancels the very logic of the contract.
The state does not have the right to create a permanent surveillance mechanism because it hurts the very essence of the right to freedom. Therefore, the very statement about the legality of such practices is false since there was no conscious consent to it. The social contract for constant surveillance is rather a mechanism of infringement of rights, limiting and normalizing the range of possible human behavior.
Surveillance boundaries can be determined by video filming of public spaces with a large crowd of people, which is adequate in the context of a terrorist threat. The perusal of correspondence on the network is an unconditional invasion of a person’s private life. The state should stop controlling social networks, except for the most private precedents, giving people the opportunity to express themselves and develop society freely.
References
Cloud, M. (2018). Property is privacy: Locke and Brandeis in the twenty-first century. American Criminal Literature Review, 55, 37-75.
Kanatli, M. (2021). Private property, freedom and order social contract theories from Hobbes to Rawls. Routledge India.
Weinberg, G. (2018). Google and Facebook are watching our every move online. It’s time to make them stop. CNBC. Web.