Concerns about online-privacy have always struck me as bit overwrought, if not downright absurd. The handwringing libertarian privacy absolutists would have us believe that information that is readily available in our offline lives deserves Top Secret level classification when put online (“Google knows my zip code and can use if for their nefarious purposes!”).
With the blurring of distinctions between online and offline information, though, this fretting about how this data is collected—particularly when it can’t be used to identify particular individuals—seem to be as peculiar as the worries in the 1950s about fluoridation of public water supplies
But while I find the privacy paranoiacs unconvincing, Nicholas Carr makes an interesting claim about the importance of privacy:
Privacy is not only essential to life and liberty; it’s essential to the pursuit of happiness, in the broadest and deepest sense of that phrase. It’s essential, as [Bruce Schneier] implies, to the development of individuality, of unique personality. We human beings are not just social creatures; we’re also private creatures. What we don’t share is as important as what we do share. The way that we choose to define the boundary between our public self and our private self will vary greatly from person to person, which is exactly why it’s so important to be ever vigilant in defending everyone’s ability and power to set that boundary as he or she sees fit. Today, online services and databases play increasingly important roles in our public and our private lives – and in the way we choose to distinguish between them. Many of those services and databases are under corporate control, operated for profit by companies like Google and Facebook. If those companies can’t be trusted to respect and defend the privacy rights of their users, they should be spurned.
Privacy is the skin of the self. Strip it away, and in no time desiccation sets in.
What do you think? Is privacy as essential as Carr claims or it is being overemphasized by a culture that prizes individualism too highly?
(Via: Alan Jacobs)
January 18th, 2010 | 9:33 am
One important distinction between online and offline information is the ease with which the online info, being in a computer, can be accessed and analyzed. Info on me that is available offline still affords me a fair amount of privacy just by virtue of the work it would take to get at and mine it.
January 18th, 2010 | 10:24 am
I tend to agree. However, I’m struck by this sentence (taken from Mr. Carr’s quote):
“Today, online services and databases play increasingly important roles in our public and our private lives – and in the way we choose to distinguish between them.”
The problem, it seems to me, lies not so much with the folks who build and manage the databases, but with those of us who freely divulge personal information and then are shocked, “shocked I tell you”, that someone, somewhere discovers your secret.
Blessings,
Michael
January 18th, 2010 | 4:22 pm
It’s really a question of property rights and ownership. Clearly no one owns me but me, but what does that specifically entail. Is my likeness private or public property? What of my date of birth, or my food preferences, or conversations I had with my family?
For conversations, if neither party mentioned it public knowledge, nor wanted to, and had the conversation on private property, then by law they “own” the rights (so to speak) on that conversation.
Now it so happens that the human voice can carry outside building even with closed doors and windows. Given a sufficiently sensitive microphone, a person in a van across the street could record the conversation. Because the microphone can records audio waves that traveled from the source out to the public streets, a rational case can be made that the recording is public property.
In the same way, our data can be captured. If all of the networked space on the internet is to be treated as public property, then all of our data when carried over the network becomes public. In which case, is it even possible to digitally transmit/transfer any kind of data with the protection of privacy?
January 19th, 2010 | 2:49 am
I think when the context is our interaction with Google et al., privacy concerns have little to do with excessive individualism, and much to do with how little effort it takes to use online info. Tim J. is on the money there. Part of paranoia is believing that someone out there would go to all that trouble, but when there’s no trouble anymore, it’s not paranoia to be concerned.
January 20th, 2010 | 12:42 am
I think that privacy violations (e.g., conversations between family, a third party’s intrusion on a transaction w/o a warrant) constitute a form of prior restraint on individuals. Consider how a politician or candidate must ruthlessly regulate everything he says or does. Now if you are in the game of politics, that’s one thing, but to have a universal blackmail regime on all people is to create a sort of self-enforcing censorship. You can’t do or say anything for the slightest probability that it may bite you at some point in the future.
Reasoning about privacy and the right thereto is often rather impoverished these days–I recall that Mr. Carter has posted about the limitations of rights talk before, and I agree with him to an extent–but that does not mean that privacy isn’t a valid and important concept.
Thank you for pointing out this article to me.
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