Fundamentals
Liberalism and individual rights: a fundamental relationship
Individual rights protect a sphere of personal decision-making from coercion, but they become effective only through general laws, independent judges, and limits on power.
Publication contributor
Articles by Daniel Sardá
This archive contains published site articles attributed to Daniel Sardá. The separate Thinkers section contains historical intellectual profiles, not publication contributors.
Fundamentals
Informed Consent: Making Decisions with Information and Freedom
Informed consent is a process of communication and decision-making that lets a person accept or refuse healthcare with sufficient information, understanding, and freedom.
Fundamentals
Digital Pseudonymity: Identity, Privacy, and Limits
Digital pseudonymity lets people participate under a stable identity other than their civil name. It can protect privacy and support reputation, but it does not guarantee anonymity or remove responsibility.
Fundamentals
Parametric Insurance: What It Is and How It Works
Parametric insurance pays according to a measurable rule agreed in advance, rather than after each individual loss is assessed. That can speed up the response, but it also creates limits worth understanding.
Fundamentals
Confidentiality of Communications: What It Protects and When It Can Be Limited
Confidentiality of communications protects an exchange from improper third-party access. Its scope extends beyond content and permits only legally defined, supervised exceptions.
Fundamentals
Privacy and Freedom of Expression: Understanding Their Limits
Privacy and freedom of expression both protect individual autonomy. Understanding their differences helps address their tensions without turning either into an excuse to nullify the other.
Fundamentals
Privacy by Design: What It Is, Its Principles, and How It Works
Privacy by design builds limits and safeguards into the first decisions about data instead of adding controls after a system has already been built.
Fundamentals
What Can Your Internet Provider See?
Your internet provider cannot see everything, but HTTPS does not make it blind. This guide separates content, destinations, and metadata, and explains what each privacy tool changes.
Fundamentals
DNS Privacy: What It Protects and Its Limits
Encrypted DNS limits who can read our queries in transit, but it neither removes the need to trust intermediaries nor hides all internet activity.
Fundamentals
Personal Data Portability: What It Is and Its Limits
Data portability can let people receive certain personal data in a reusable format and, in some cases, move it to another provider. Its scope depends on the law, technology, and the rights of others.
Fundamentals
Digital Metadata: What It Is, Its Types, and Why It Matters
Metadata describes and helps manage files, documents, and other digital resources. Knowing where it resides and what it can reveal helps us use it well while keeping privacy in view.
Fundamentals
Data Protection Laws: What They Regulate and How to Identify the Applicable Rules
Data protection is not only about keeping information secure: it sets limits, responsibilities, and rights governing how information is collected and used.
Fundamentals
Technology Transparency Reports: What They Are and How to Evaluate Them
A guide to the evidence an organization should provide about its technologies, decision-makers, risks, and limits.
Fundamentals
HTTPS and Privacy: What a Secure Connection Protects—and Its Limits
HTTPS protects communication between a browser and server, but it does not decide what a site does with data or make a user anonymous.
Fundamentals
Quantitative Easing: What It Is, How It Works, and Its Limits
Quantitative easing exchanges financial assets for reserves to influence yields and financing conditions. Its results depend on the context, expectations, and institutions.
Fundamentals
Privacy Impact Assessment: What It Is and Why It Matters
A practical explanation of how to anticipate the effects of data processing, assess its proportionality, and choose safeguards before it goes live.
Fundamentals
Lorenz Curve: What It Shows and How to Read It
The Lorenz curve visualizes how income, wealth, or another total is distributed across a population. This guide explains how to read and construct it, and where its limits lie.
Fundamentals
Digital identity compartmentalization: separating contexts without trying to disappear
Separating accounts, identifiers, and habits by context can limit the creation of a single profile. The key is knowing which links to avoid and how much effort each case warrants.
Fundamentals
End-to-end encryption: what it protects and where its limits lie
End-to-end encryption prevents intermediaries from reading a communication’s content, but it does not amount to complete privacy or anonymity.
Fundamentals
Zero-Access Encryption: What It Protects and Its Limits
Zero-access encryption reduces the trust placed in a provider, but its protection depends on who controls the keys, which data are encrypted, and how recovery works.
Fundamentals
Mass Surveillance: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Needs Limits
Mass surveillance observes or analyzes data from broad populations without prior individualized suspicion. Understanding its scope helps assess its risks, justifications, and safeguards.
Fundamentals
Government Surveillance of Communications: Scope, Risks, and Limits
Surveillance of communications is not limited to listening to calls: it can also involve collecting, retaining, and analyzing data that reveal relationships, habits, and movements. Understanding its limits requires distinguishing purpose, scope, and oversight.
Fundamentals
International Investment Position: What It Measures and How to Read It
The international investment position shows an economy’s financial assets and liabilities vis-à-vis the rest of the world at a given date. This guide explains how to read it without turning its net balance into an automatic diagnosis.
Fundamentals
Monetary Policy Forward Guidance: What It Is and Its Limits
Forward guidance lets a central bank explain the likely path of its policy. Its influence depends on the stated conditions, credibility, and the responses of millions of people.