Fundamentals
State Surveillance and Individual Liberty: Limits and Safeguards
Surveillance can serve legitimate security aims, but its power requires clear rules, limited scope, independent oversight, and effective remedies.
Publication contributor
Articles by Daniel Sardá · Page 7
This archive contains published site articles attributed to Daniel Sardá. The separate Thinkers section contains historical intellectual profiles, not publication contributors.
Fundamentals
Financial Privacy: What It Protects, Why It Matters, and Its Limits
Financial privacy lets people know about and limit the use of data about their economic lives. It does not require absolute secrecy, but rules, purpose, and accountability.
Fundamentals
Encryption, Privacy, and Freedom: What It Protects and Where Its Limits Lie
Encryption protects the confidentiality of messages and files, but it does not guarantee anonymity or complete security. Understanding its limits makes for a more rigorous debate about privacy, freedom, and government access.
Fundamentals
Do You Own Your Personal Data? Rights, Control, and Ownership
Personal data is about us, but that does not necessarily make it property we can sell or reclaim like an object. The distinction matters for understanding our rights and the limits on companies and public authorities.
Analysis
Digital Privacy and Security: Two Protections That Are Not the Same
An account can be highly secure while still collecting more information than necessary. Distinguishing privacy from security helps people choose better services, reduce risks, and demand accountability.
Practical
AI and privacy: what data not to share and how to reduce risk
A practical guide to classifying information, removing unnecessary data, and choosing the right channel before using an artificial intelligence tool.
Practical
AI and Personal Data: How to Use These Tools with More Control
A practical guide to deciding what to share with an AI tool, minimizing personal data, and retaining control over how it is used.
Fundamentals
Privacy: What It Is and Why It Matters
Privacy protects a sphere of personal discretion and decision-making. Understanding it requires distinguishing it from secrecy, anonymity, and data protection.
Fundamentals
Occupation and Property Rights: What It Means in Civil Law
Occupation may allow ownership of an ownerless thing, but physical control alone is not enough: intent, the nature of the asset, and the applicable law all matter.
Fundamentals
Freedom of Expression in Venezuela: Safeguards, Limits, and Reality
Venezuela’s Constitution recognizes freedom of expression and plural communication. Understanding its reach requires distinguishing censorship, liability, and effective protection.
Fundamentals
Liberalism and pluralism: living with disagreement
A free society does not require everyone to share the same idea of a good life. It needs rules that let people disagree without turning one particular conviction into an obligation for everyone else.
Fundamentals
Progressive Liberalism: Meaning, Principles, and Differences
Progressive liberalism combines civil liberties and legal limits on power with a reform-minded effort to broaden people’s real opportunities. The label, however, has several historical and political meanings.
Fundamentals
Fiat Money and Social Cooperation: How It Coordinates Exchange
Fiat money lets people exchange, calculate, and contract in a common unit. That coordination does not arise from decree alone: it depends on acceptance, institutions, and stability.
Fundamentals
Contracts and Property: How They Differ and How They Connect
Property defines the powers a person has over an asset; a contract creates obligations between people. Understanding the difference clarifies what happens when something is sold, rented, or lent.
Fundamentals
Private Property: What It Is, What It Protects, and Why It Matters
Private property assigns powers and responsibilities over assets. Understanding it means distinguishing ownership from possession, material control, and unlimited power.
Fundamentals
Religious Tolerance: Meaning and Limits
Religious tolerance makes it possible to live with disagreement: it protects believers and nonbelievers without demanding doctrinal approval or surrendering the freedom to criticize.
Fundamentals
Property and Autonomy: Their Relationship, Differences, and Limits
Property can widen the room people have to decide how to live, but it neither guarantees autonomy nor justifies every title or use of assets.
Fundamentals
Privatization of Money: What It Means and What Hayek Proposed
Privatization of money can refer to different things. Hayek's proposal was to allow competing currencies and rely on users' choices, issuers' reputations, and issuer accountability to discipline them.
Fundamentals
Individual Privacy: What It Protects and Why It Matters for Liberty
Individual privacy lets people decide who may access their spaces, communications, relationships, information, and choices. It is neither isolation nor absolute secrecy, but a practical condition of autonomy.
Fundamentals
Personhood and Freedom: Dignity, Choice, and Limits on Power
To recognize someone as a person is to take seriously their capacity to choose, their equal dignity, and their right to live free from arbitrary coercion. But freedom also entails responsibility and reciprocal limits.
Fundamentals
Monetary Monopoly: What It Is, What It Controls, and What Its Limits Are
A monetary monopoly concentrates powers over the official currency, but it does not mean control over all money. Understanding its limits helps assess its benefits, risks, and checks.
Fundamentals
The Limits of Spontaneous Order
Spontaneous order explains how coordination can arise without a central director. It also has limits: it depends on rules and does not, by itself, justify its outcomes.
Fundamentals
Limits of Natural Law: What It Requires and What It Cannot Settle
Natural law provides standards for judging power and law, but it does not replace legislation, interpretation, or institutional safeguards.
Fundamentals
Limits on Political Power: What They Are and How They Protect Freedom
Limiting power does not mean preventing government from acting; it means subjecting public authority to rights, predictable rules, and effective checks.