Sure we do. It's just not a definition encoded in law. But what the law says doesn't change my view of what's right and wrong.

If the law says I have no privacy whatsoever, all that would mean is that I need to put a great deal more effort into safeguarding my privacy.

It will however change whether you go to jail for acting on your beliefs of right and wrong.

Possibly, but that doesn't change anything.

Unless you're talking only about yourself, I can assure you, making "You go to jail for this" part of the equation definitely shapes aggregate societal behavior. Source: history.

And if push comes to shove, the American administration is less than 20,000 people. There are 300 million people in thin country and less than 20 million service members.

The people can take this country if they want it. It would be ugly but it's entirely possible.

Oof. Your estimates of the power of 300 million people to overcome a military 20 million strong do not match mine. If we're assuming complete consolidation of groups (i.e. those 20 million wholly aligned against the 300 million)... Modern warfare is entirely asymmetric. It depends on how willing that military would be to deploy air power, bombs, and smart weapons. To say nothing of how much organization of such a resistance could be stymied by the simple expedient of shutting off the grid (electrical and communications) that could occur in an open civil war.

... in the abstract. I hardly imagine it'd come to a shooting war over something like the perpetual push-pull of figuring out what "privacy" is. That's a conversation that's been going on for hundreds of years.

I wasn't talking about whether or not it shapes behavior. Of course it does. What I meant was that it doesn't change the point I was making, or the ethics of the situation.

This simply isn't true, but I am not surprised that such a statement comes from shadowgovt

Can you clarify what aspect isn't true? It is the nature of law to take informal behaviors and codify them into "legal" and "illegal." At that point, individual people's beliefs on a topic no longer hold full authority over what they may choose freely to do; the law dictates what one must or must not do.

(And that's just the behavioral aspect. The literal, legal aspect is that laws define terminology. From a legal standpoint, personal definitions are irrelevant when the law recognizes a definition in plain-letter).

I think that what isn't true is the notion that any law is permanent. Laws can and do get changed or even removed over time.

This is true. Laws are modified over time.

... the law rarely completely leaves the field once it has entered into regulating something previously unregulated. To do so is, generally, seen as returning an issue that needed the heavy hand of force back to the "chaos" of personal choices. So once the law replaces the murky, per-person-and-entity definition of "privacy" with a legal definition, that definition will stick.

I expect, for example, any law latching what data companies may and may not keep to be very, very sticky. The details may change, but I find it highly unlikely that the government, having crafted such a law, will return to the condition of "On this, the law remains silent; it is up to the corporations what they collect and the people what they yield," which is (mostly, with some notable exceptions) the status quo.

Can you think of examples where something was regulated and then the government retuned it to an unregulated state? Closest example I can think of was Prohibition; we added and removed an entire amendment, and even then, the current state is "a combination of state and federal authority regulates alcohol," stepped down from a ban.