I'm on ur Intarwebz...

My understanding of positive and negative rights from Sara Baase's explanation is that positive rights are rights that society has to actively enforce and that negative rights are rights that society has to consciously not break. A simpler way of phrasing it is that positive rights involve "doing something" while negative rights involve "not doing something". The two rights can also be viewed as active and passive rights respectively, where positive rights aren't fulfilled until something is actively done to promote it while negative rights are always there until something counteracts it.

A situation where we can view the two rights with respect to digital privacy is the use of Torrents. If, say, we had a positive right to be anonymous whenever we are seeding or leeching off a Torrent, then it would be fulfilled when the law considers it illegal, the client in use actively hides your IP address from anyone who wants to view it with the use of encryption, proxies, and whatnot and Torrent clients disallowed the user from viewing those who are linked to a Torrent tracker. If the same right was a negative right, then users are not allowed by law to use IP addresses linked to the tracker to trace the identity of a user. Whether or not there are safety measures in place to prevent tracing or viewing IP addresses is irrelevant to the negative right.

As for which one would be more appropriate for digital privacy, I never choose an extreme and i think that a combination of the two is needed to ensure the best coverage of privacy. However, just between the two, I would rather have negative rights rather than positive rights. This is because there rights explicitly say what you cannot do and implies that anything else is considered fair game. When properly worded, it also appears to me that negative rights also leave less room for loop holes and grey areas as compared to positive right.