Take harmlessness seriously
The strongest case is straightforward: ethical restrictions should protect people's interests. If an action genuinely harms no one, condemning it needs a reason beyond an offended procedure. An approach centered on consequences can also consider foreseeable risks and damaged trust; it need not wait for an injury before objecting.
The private letter
Imagine someone opens another person's private letter without permission, expecting to find only a harmless detail. The letter proves entirely innocuous. That discovery cannot establish what was justified before opening it: the decision was made without knowing everything inside.
But suppose we strengthen the premise. There is genuinely no adverse consequence, not merely none we noticed. I would still give the owner a claim to decide who reads the letter. That is my ethical position about control and consent. Someone who grounds every such claim entirely in consequences may disagree; hidden harm cannot quietly win the argument for me.
An urgent protective duty might justify access. Conversely, permission from the owner would not excuse harming someone else. Consent matters without serving as a universal certificate of goodness.
Pause here: If no adverse consequence occurred at all, would the owner's control still matter to you? Why?
Permission needs reasons too
The Memory specification distinguishes locating information from qualifying and admitting its use. The regulator design places an authority check before relevance scoring. These mechanisms can implement permission boundaries; their existence neither proves those boundaries morally justified nor demonstrates their actual enforcement.
We should ask both whether the chosen policy deserves support and whether the system follows it. A useful fact does not answer either question simply by being useful.
Proportion still matters. An inadvertent mistake followed by honest repair differs from deliberate exploitation. Repair can improve the situation without supplying permission retroactively; respecting boundaries need not become a competition to assign the harshest blame.
My answer: No harm is a strong ethical consideration, but on the view defended here it does not exhaust what people are owed. That conclusion requires a case for consent and fair treatment, not a switch from no harm to no observed harm.