I think society is better off if nobody is allowed to purchase advertising data that identifies specific people and use it to uncover their activities.
Possibly with the exception of elected officials. :)
Whether it’s right or wrong from the perspective of the church or followers of the religion should be separate from our rules about privacy.
Priests within a religion are something like government officials and something like members in a fraternal or sororal organization (such as the Masons or Elks). In another sense they're like "independent sales representatives" in a multi-level marketing scheme. In another sense they'd be like enlisted or officers in a military. In another sense they'd be like executives in a corporation (who have contractual fiduciary, and yes, moral obligations that regular employees don't have).
The duties and expectations are different from that of regular employees. In fact, I'm sure most religious institutions have many regular employees (such as janitors, some teachers for religious schools, etcetera), who are probably held to lesser standards.
> Whether it’s right or wrong from the perspective of the church or followers of the religion should be separate from our rules about privacy.
Yes. Unfortunately we don't have many such rules when it comes to data we've shared with third parties.
> This is about your view of morals as they relate to religion though, right? Legally speaking priests are employees and the church is the employer.
Everyone involved in this discussion is positing moral views that are independent from the current law. It's apparently legal for companies to sell their users personal data, just as a priest may be legally considered an "employee" even though I don't think that is what a priest is.
> I think our government system should treat them as such.
> Whether it’s right or wrong from the perspective of the church or followers of the religion should be separate from our rules about privacy.
I would disagree that the government should treat priests as employees, but regrettably I think this won't be a fruitful venue for discussing this since it's likely that we have too many different priors in this area that would take too long to hash out.
In terms of how privacy rules should work, I am generally inclined to support generalized prohibitions on selling/distributing user data without an explicit voluntary opt-in. Where I likely differ is in that I don't believe that in principle it's wrong to use available data in ways that I see as being moral. If a company has data that would prove one of their users is a serial killer I'd say they'd have the obligation to use that to help the killer get caught, but I also think generally in order to prevent greater societal evils that user data should be protected.
I'll try an example, hopefully it's not too strained. I think spying on people in their homes would be bad, it would be detrimental to familial privacy and unity among other things. But if someone happens to see into someone's house and witness a crime I wouldn't have any issue with that crime being reported. So I can say we should have laws preventing peeping toms/protecting privacy in homes while also not seeing every instantiation of acquiring information as being immoral in and of itself. Hope that makes sense, I'm a bit scrambled right now regrettably.