An Argument for the Right of Privacy

In The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America, Jeffrey Rosen argues that disclosing one salacious fact about a person may result in that person getting an inaccurate, and thus unfair reputation. He further argues that disclosing full information about a person, say all the websites that they have visited, results in people overloading with input and thus selecting (perhaps at random) a very limited set of that information on which to form an opinion of the subject of the disclosure, and again an unfair opinion. He then says that the protection of privacy is the best and perhaps the only protection that individuals have against such unfair judgments by others.

Unfairly extrapolating from his comments, humans have evolved to form interpersonal bonds relatively slowly, in part through the exchange of confidences. Culturally, we have modes of communication within the family or within groups of friends which are quite different than in a public setting. Putting communications from the circle of friends and/or family into the public setting can also result in very unfair judgments of the person so revealed, and thus should be protected by privacy.

So, in terms of the theme of this blog -- Knowledge for Development -- where does one draw the line between information in the public domain to inform our knowledge and information that should be protected by privacy? In a time in which surveillance cameras are found in our cities in the tens of thousands, in which electronic communication can be monitored and data mining computers can extract the most damning information from the most fleeting comment, in which remote sensing can track a person's every movement without his recognizing that fact, in which the U.S. Government officials can feel empowered to extract information by torture or to authorize surveillance without due process of law, the issue of rights to privacy versus rights to information has become urgent and complex.