Privacy has become a dirty word; it stands for a paradox, a poor joke, and an aspect of life that has undergone a significant paradigm shift since the impingement of the Internet on our lives.
The paradox here is that we seem to volunteer up our personal data quite freely, imprinting our tiny slice of cyberspace with our thoughts, feelings, likes and dislikes, yet we maintain a proclivity towards conjuring up grand sentiments of anger and fear when our perceived rights to privacy online are violated.
The poor joke is that we are constrained by the irrelevance of choice; the compounding losses associated with opting out of social media, media sharing platforms, and whatever other online niches we might be intrigued by.
The significant shift alludes to the way in which the handling of our personal data has undergone a transformation from when we used to selectively divulge personal information at the behest of government agencies, or private corporations, to be stored in a physical medium, to the way in which we can now transform those bland forms and contracts into pieces of digital information, to be stored, copied, downloaded, uploaded, manipulated, and transferred, in an instant.
Privacy is messy, complex, and fluid; we can examine the individual's right to seclusion, or the right to decide when, how, and to whom, your personal information is communicated, or we could consider the legalistic slant, of defining privacy as a right with the individual at the crux of the data, enabled with the choice to volunteer access and control to others. Ought we to consider privacy as a moral obligation, or as a societal norm? Should we apply existing laws to protect privacy online or should we simply leave it in the hands of the end-user?
Regardless of which approach we choose to begin the process of conceptualizing privacy, we can agree on a few basic values of privacy.
I would argue that privacy is a 'democratic' good, similar to the way in which the ancient Romans held wine to be a 'democratic' good; that is to say that every individual, regardless of socio-economic status, origin and environment, ought to enjoy the same benefits and pitfalls of the good. Just as a lowly born pleb might find himself inebriated after his third amphora of wine, the noble patrician would too feel the pangs of a hangover post alcoholic revelry. All users online ought to be afforded the same level of privacy online; that is to say that they ought to be able to decide when to volunteer up personal information, be safe in the knowledge that that information will not be sold or revealed to unseen forces, be afforded security via the ability to change and update that information, and not have an altered Internet browsing experience because of that information's presence on the server.
I would also argue that privacy is linked to autonomy, so that each individual user should be able to upload personal information, choose a pool of people to share that information with, and then restrict all undesirable forces from viewing and colonizing that information. If we allowed others to manipulate the information we've volunteered, we lose our ability to operate as self-interested autonomous actors, thus stripping away what decades of development in liberal-democratic nations have hoped to achieve in terms of liberty and freedom of thought, speech and expression.
Privacy online ought to be viewed as an intimate relationship between the user and the user's chosen set of entities to view that information. Just as we are constrained from installing wiretaps on our neighbors phone lines, we must see the same type of decency afforded to individuals online; to exploit loopholes on social media sites, or be the victim of an uninformed sale of personal information to ad agencies, it would be beneficial to instead allow only the user him/herself to decide on when to press ahead with sharing information with the world at large.
The paradox here is that we seem to volunteer up our personal data quite freely, imprinting our tiny slice of cyberspace with our thoughts, feelings, likes and dislikes, yet we maintain a proclivity towards conjuring up grand sentiments of anger and fear when our perceived rights to privacy online are violated.
The poor joke is that we are constrained by the irrelevance of choice; the compounding losses associated with opting out of social media, media sharing platforms, and whatever other online niches we might be intrigued by.
The significant shift alludes to the way in which the handling of our personal data has undergone a transformation from when we used to selectively divulge personal information at the behest of government agencies, or private corporations, to be stored in a physical medium, to the way in which we can now transform those bland forms and contracts into pieces of digital information, to be stored, copied, downloaded, uploaded, manipulated, and transferred, in an instant.
Privacy is messy, complex, and fluid; we can examine the individual's right to seclusion, or the right to decide when, how, and to whom, your personal information is communicated, or we could consider the legalistic slant, of defining privacy as a right with the individual at the crux of the data, enabled with the choice to volunteer access and control to others. Ought we to consider privacy as a moral obligation, or as a societal norm? Should we apply existing laws to protect privacy online or should we simply leave it in the hands of the end-user?
Regardless of which approach we choose to begin the process of conceptualizing privacy, we can agree on a few basic values of privacy.
I would argue that privacy is a 'democratic' good, similar to the way in which the ancient Romans held wine to be a 'democratic' good; that is to say that every individual, regardless of socio-economic status, origin and environment, ought to enjoy the same benefits and pitfalls of the good. Just as a lowly born pleb might find himself inebriated after his third amphora of wine, the noble patrician would too feel the pangs of a hangover post alcoholic revelry. All users online ought to be afforded the same level of privacy online; that is to say that they ought to be able to decide when to volunteer up personal information, be safe in the knowledge that that information will not be sold or revealed to unseen forces, be afforded security via the ability to change and update that information, and not have an altered Internet browsing experience because of that information's presence on the server.
I would also argue that privacy is linked to autonomy, so that each individual user should be able to upload personal information, choose a pool of people to share that information with, and then restrict all undesirable forces from viewing and colonizing that information. If we allowed others to manipulate the information we've volunteered, we lose our ability to operate as self-interested autonomous actors, thus stripping away what decades of development in liberal-democratic nations have hoped to achieve in terms of liberty and freedom of thought, speech and expression.
Privacy online ought to be viewed as an intimate relationship between the user and the user's chosen set of entities to view that information. Just as we are constrained from installing wiretaps on our neighbors phone lines, we must see the same type of decency afforded to individuals online; to exploit loopholes on social media sites, or be the victim of an uninformed sale of personal information to ad agencies, it would be beneficial to instead allow only the user him/herself to decide on when to press ahead with sharing information with the world at large.
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