The next three laws will be the shoulders which our privacy can rest upon:

1. A Corporation, Organization or Government may not invade the privacy of a human being. It may only happen with explicit permission, requiring full transparency of the purpose behind the data extraction. The individual has to understand the real use of his or her data.

2. A Corporation, Organization or Government must give up the ownership of that data. It is the individual who owns it. It can’t be stored nor used in the future. It may only be used in the future for other purposes, except where such usage would conflict with the First Law.

3. A Corporation, Organization or Government may have permission to invade an individual’s privacy and make use of his or her data, as long as such permission does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

In what situations would rule 3 apply? I'm probably misunderstanding something because it seems to me that rules 1 and 2 in combination rule out any possible use under rule 3.

To me, rules 1 and 2 in isolation, and in combination seem extreme (again, I may be misunderstanding any exceptions outlined in rules 3). They grossly limit both freedom expression and public dissemination, the ability to conduct research and so on.

The implications here go far beyond what you've considered in the rest of the post and for the rest of society.

There's a reason why there's no right to privacy in The Bill of Rights, although this out-dated 18th century document grants individuals crazy rights that can't be balanced as it is.

Here are a handful of examples:

1. The free press. Rules 1 and 2 would require all journalists to actively declare both their presence, and purpose of reporting/recording/presence/investigation. This empowers huge corporate entities and people in position of power to evade scrutiny or present facades any time someone wishes to record events for posterity.

2. Police investigations. Rules one against recording data without consent/declaration and rule two against storage of investigative material means (government) investigation into possible wrongdoing becomes impossible.

3. Right to your own likeness. Your image/likeness is part of your data (as are other biometrics). A right to deny others to publish your image has wide-ranging consequences for a number of industries. A right to all images of your likeness ("your data") is the nail in the coffin for professional photography, to give one example.

4. Research. Huge databases of properly anonymized medical data exist for research purposes of various kinds. These sorts of things are the basis for cancer research, epidemiological studies and so on. Rule 3 prevents any of that data to be used for people who're deceased for future research, or requires huge bureaucracy for consent-seeking to use old data for new research.

5. Destruction of information. The onus for storing data about people becomes their own responsibility. This necessarily leads to huge loss of data as everyone won't save their data in reasonable ways, or wish to save perfectly harmless, anonymized data for the benefit of society/humankind.

New regulations for advertisers and other third-party selling of information are necessary.

I think that should be done directly through legislation towards those industries to avoid all the unintended consequences of sweeping rights/rules.

Absolute rights without exceptions (even such as in the Bill of Rights in the US) will always conflict in various ways. It's my view those conflicts should be addressed through legislation rather than unelected judges making those determinations for themselves.

Good point all around and I fully support your work. We really need some live ammo in this discussion that everybody can understand. I think the 3 rules are a great start that a lot of people can easily understand.

I find very odd that an article on privacy was published on Medium.