Perspective

It's Mine, Damnit!

An issue that's come up recently in the news is one of those tricky areas within youth rights that requires a bit more thought and consideration than some other issues. It's the question of privacy and property rights of young people under the Magic Age of 18 who are living in their parents' home.
A law passed in Georgia recently makes it legal for parents to wiretap their kids' phone conversations. This was done to try and bypass Georgia's general laws on recording phone conversations, which require at least one person being recorded to know about it, so as to allow parents tapes of their kids' phone conversations to be admissable. Now, it would strike me as obvious that this particular law, which is based purely on age-bias, is wrong. It creates a diminished standard of rights for those below the Magic Age, not on any assertion of parental property rights over the phone (which would have been negated by Georgia's law recording one party knowing about it anyhow), but simply based on the assertion that young people, by virtue of being young people, have no right to privacy.
Let's put aside this particular law for the moment though, as it seems a pretty straightforward instance of age-bias and there are related issues more worthy of our attention. For instance, what expectations of privacy should young people have regarding their phone conversations, their rooms, their computers?
Let us consider this question from a property-rights perspective. After all, if the parents own the computer or phone line or whatever, then the case would seem to be pretty open-and-shut against young people retaining any right to privacy. But it is not quite that simple. For instance, in the aforementioned case regarding the recording laws in Georgia, you had a situation where a law protected ANYONE from being recorded if at least one of the parties didn't know about it. So the first step in defending youth rights on this particular issue would seem to be to lobby against laws diminishing the rights of youth when those rights are already granted to others.
That's only part of the equation though. What about if you have a situation where a young person is living under his parents' roof but pays for his own phone line, or bought his own computer? Given such circumstances, it would seem to me that such a young person should have the expectation of privacy that comes with full ownership of the means of his communication. In other words, no wiretapping. Unfortunately a problem with this idea
is that young people are not considered to retain full property rights since they are "minors", and thus all their property is parental property. Not to mention that to be able to work to earn the money required to buy one's own things, one has to jump through legal hoops that often require a parent's permission if one is a minor. It would seem to me that a major and important goal for the youth rights movement should be both the elimination of the laws that restrict young people's natural right to work, and the establishment of laws respecting the property rights of young people to at the very least the things they purchased as a result of their own hard work. A lack of respect for such rights makes young people in modern society nothing more than feudal serfs working for their parents' benefit, whose natural right to use their property is entirely dependent on the good graces of their feudal master. Does this seem like a proper arrangment in a free society that purportedly embraces capitalism and respects the private property rights inherent in that concept? I think not.
Moving on, what about the issue of parents rummaging through one's personal effects in one's room? Well, while it would certainly seem that parents should respect one's right to privacy in that regard, it is difficult to find such protection under the umbrella of property rights given the current context of youth rights, or lack thereof, in this country. However, it may not be impossibly so. For instance, if a young person's parents give him a piece of furniture to put clothes in, would it be unreasonable to assume the furniture is a gift in a sense, and thus now the property of the young person (with full accompanying rights and protections granted to the owner)? It's a question worth considering more, as such an understanding of property seems plausible, and would be greatly beneficial to the privacy of young people if the courts adopted it.