Most people are afraid of having very personal information being released to the government - they want private data about things like what they buy and read to remain private. Instead of stricter privacy standards, though, should we perhaps have looser ones? Should people just be more open and honest about what they do rather than secretive?

In the Autumn 2000 issue of The Wilson Quarterly, Jeffrey Rosen writes:

Defenders of transparency argue that more information, rather than less, is our best protection against misjudgment. ... Defenders of transparency ... question the social value of privacy. Richard Posner, the federal appeals court judge, argues that privacy can be inefficient and contribute to social fraud and misrepresentation, because it allows people to conceal true but embarrassing information about themselves from other people in order to gain unfair social or economic advantage.

Philosopher Richard Wasserstrom suggests that our insistence on leading dual lives--one public, the other private--can amount to a kind of deception and hypocrisy; if we were less embarrassed by sexual and other private activities that have traditionally been associated with shame, we would have less to fear from disclosure because we would have nothing to hide. David Brin argues in the same vein in The Transparent Society (1998), and quotes John Perry Barlow, former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, now an advocate on cyberspace issues: “I have no secrets myself, and I think that everybody would be a lot happier and safer if they just let everything be known. Then nobody could use anything against them.”

These defenders of transparency are confusing secrecy with privacy. But secrecy is only a small dimension of privacy if privacy is defined as the ability to control the conditions under which personal information is disclosed to others. Even those who claim that society would be better off if people were less embarrassed about discussing their sexual activities in public manage to feel annoyed and invaded when they are solicited by telemarketers during dinner.

Perhaps it would be better if we allowed more things about ourselves to be known, but shouldn't we also have control over what gets released, how, when, and to whom? Some information might make us look far worse than is true if it is released in the wrong way or at the wrong time. Strict privacy laws that give us control over our personal information would still therefore be necessary.

Then there is the fact that not everyone needs to know everything about every person’s life. It’s one thing to say that people shouldn’t be ashamed if they read romance novels or watch pornographic videos, but it’s another to say that details about what a person prefers to watch — or do — should be available to everyone. There is, for example, the very basic question of intimacy: if everyone has and is entitled to the same information about us, then that would eliminate the notion of intimacy which is in part defined by sharing more about oneself with certain people than with others.

 

Read More:

• Guide to Ethics and Morality
• News About Ethics
• Privacy & Autonomy