Privacy exemplar

 Privacy

The Cambridge Dictionary defines privacy as “the right that someone has to keep their personal life or personal information secret or known only to a small group of people.”  Many definitions of privacy say that it is a right, but do we really need to keep information about ourselves secret from others?

 

The website Teach Privacy lists ten reasons why privacy is important. Two that stand out are:

•      Keeping information private limits the power that other people have over us.  This includes companies and governments. Many people who have sent sexts have discovered what can happen when you lose control of information that should stay private. However, there is a lot of personal information available online, and most people are OK with that. Often they post it there themselves.

•      Getting second chances.  If you have made a mistake, you should have the opportunity to fix it and not have the world remind you of what you did. The Internet Law Centre lists many examples of people who have suffered because foolish things they did remained online years later. On the other hand, this is only a problem because some people forget that people can change and improve. Perhaps a better solution is for people to learn that they can’t judge someone based on what they did in the past.

 

But not everyone believes that privacy is important.

•      Privacy creates opportunities for people to abuse others. Anonymous (and not anonymous) comments on the Internet often end up being overrun by trolls. A great example of where privacy can lead is the website 4chan that has become synonymous with offensive and abusive online posts. But a lack of privacy also creates opportunities for the powerful to abuse the less powerful (as noted above)

•      Many people behave as though their privacy doesn’t matter at all]. We keep on buying devices and using services that collect and share our information. Despite this, nothing terrible is happening to the majority of people who do these things. But this argument ignores the fact that some people do suffer serious consequences – just like most people who don’t wear a seatbelt don’t have serious injuries, because they weren’t involved in an accident.

 

It seems that privacy can be important, and that different people value it differently. Perhaps what is needed is the ability for people to choose to keep their information private if they wish, and share it when they want to.