Tuesday 26 February 2008

Invasions of privacy on the starship Enterprise

I have come to the conclusion that people in the 24th century must have very different expectations of privacy to us. At any time, it seems anyone can ask the computer to locate anyone else on board. If you're trying for a secret rendezvous, that's something you have to keep in mind. Also, there don't seem to be any privacy locks or controls on the holodeck, so you shouldn't run anything truly personal there. Nor should you even store a personal holodeck program, because it seems anyone can call it up later if they so desire.

Now, there may be some privacy controls in place that are not obvious to me - for instance, it might be that only your commanding officer can view things that belong to you - but that is never made obvious. Also, it seems there are personal identifications and you can manually assign arbitrary locking codes to personal files and functions, but the crew rarely seem to bother. There is probably a feeling that if you hide something, it must be illicit.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's probably because it would complicate the plot too much.
PPS - I don't have enough info about the original series to compare to that.

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