Thinking about privacy

I have been reading The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America by Jeffrey Rosen, and I got to thinking about privacy. The right to privacy, if you think about it, is really a right to restrict the amount of information others obtain and thus the knowledge that they gain.

As I mentioned in a previous posting, Rosen makes the point that protection of one's privacy is especially important in preventing others from deriving false impressions from biased and partial knowledge of one, which seems a valid point. As this blog has pointed out, not all that we regard as knowledge is true, and that thus it is important to retain a willingness to reexamine our knowledge and to replace knowledge with better knowledge when that becomes available.

Returning to privacy, sometimes it is personal, and sometimes communal. Thus we feel that spousal communication is privileged, and a spouse can not be forced to testify about information obtained within a marriage. We also recognize the confidentiality of lawyer-client, and priest-penitent communication. I would also feel that religious rituals can legitimately be private, such as those of some of the native American nations which believe they would be polluted by the observation of non-initiates.

It seems to me that the rights to privacy are culturally defined, not only in the sense that they vary from culture to culture, but in that they are often communicated tacitly and are unexamined. They are deeply held attitudes that are not derived from rational analysis, but rather from custom and example. As such they are especially difficult to accept when exposed to another culture, or even to understand.

Indigenous peoples living in tropical climates, who wear few clothes, probably have as much difficulty understanding American perceptions of minimal acceptable clothing as Americans have in understanding the more stringent restrictions on women's clothing in conservative Jewish or Muslim cultures. Alternatively, we find it quite strange when people flaunt what we believe to be minimal standards of decency (in the protection of their own privacy or in the invasion of the privacy of others).

It is important that we understand the nature of privacy taboos because:

• technological advances pose threats to traditional standards for the rights of privacy;
• globalization results in people from different cultures, with different perceived rights to privacy, coming into more and closer contact, and thus changing each others cultural norms and standards;
• changing circumstances result in differing costs and benefits from privacy norms, and may drive changes in privacy.

I remember some years ago having a discussion about the cameras that are increasingly being used to monitor the speed of vehicles and which are combined with computer processes to issue tickets to the owners of cars that are found to be speeding. Some people feel that the systems invade their privacy, while I feel that there is no inherent right to break speed limits, and in fact cars are required to have license plates so that their owners can be readily identified if the car is involved in an illegal act.

Increasingly cameras and other sensing devices are embedded in our surroundings, and thus information is gathered about us in ways that were not possible in the past. Perhaps the issue is not so much to limit the gathering of the information, but to limit the ways in which that information can be used to inform the knowledge of different actors for different purposes. Thus I see no problem with surveillance cameras being used to deter theft, but some problems with them being used to inform marketers of consumer behavior where that knowledge would be used to encourage impulse buying, and significant problems where they would be used to provide the basis for blackmail.

I suppose that in a society in which norms are increasingly explicit, defined in laws and regulations, we will elaborate an increasingly complex set of rules for the protection of the rights of privacy, such as the requirement of warrants for governmental surveillance. The rule making will balance human rights with the public good, and indeed we are facing some of those controversies now. To what degree and in what circumstances can coercion be used to obtain information that might prevent terrorist acts? How and how much do we limit data mining of electronic data to balance the protection of privacy and the public safety?

Our foreign policy with respect to surveillance should be made with the understanding that our domestic attitudes toward privacy may be quite different than those of people in another culture -- people who we are now able to observe in ways that they do not expect nor understand, and may not approve. Equally, American entertainment programming, which is increasingly available worldwide, may thrust information on other people that they find objectionable.

Someone once said that they have more faith in courtesy than morality. If we can not depend on the respect for the rights of privacy as a moral imperative, let us be sure that all understand how profoundly discourteous it is to invade someone else's privacy observing that which they feel it improper to observe, or displaying that which they feel it improper for them to observe.