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ISSUES: Privacy
Chapter 1: What is privacy?
Chapter
1 What is privacy?
What is privacy?
Privacy is a fundamental right, essential
to autonomy and the protection
of human dignity, serving as the
foundation upon which many other
human rights are built.
Privacy enables us to create barriers and
manage boundaries to protect ourselves
from unwarranted interference in our
lives, which allows us to negotiate who
we are and how we want to interact
with the world around us. Privacy helps
us establish boundaries to limit who has
access to our bodies, places and things,
as well as our communications and our
information.
The rules that protect privacy give us the
ability to assert our rights in the face of
significant power imbalances.
As a result, privacy is an essential way
we seek to protect ourselves and society
against arbitrary and unjustified use
of power, by reducing what can be
known about us and done to us, while
protecting us fromothers whomay wish
to exert control.
Privacy is essential to who we are as
human beings, and we make decisions
about it every single day. It gives
us a space to be ourselves without
judgement, allows us to think freely
without discrimination, and is an
important element of giving us control
over who knows what about us.
Why does it matter?
In modern society, the deliberation
around privacy is a debate about
modern freedoms.
As we consider how we establish
and protect the boundaries around
the individual, and the ability of the
individual to have a say in what happens
to him or her, we are equally trying to
decide:
Ö
Ö
the ethics of modern life;
Ö
Ö
the rules governing the conduct
of commerce; and
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the restraints we place upon the
power of the state.
Technology
has
always
been
intertwined with this right. For
instance, our capabilities to protect
privacy are greater today than ever
before, yet the capabilities that now
exist for surveillance are without
precedent.
We can now uniquely identify
individuals amidst mass data sets and
streams, and equally make decisions
about people based on broad
swathes of data. It is now possible
for companies and governments
to monitor every conversation we
conduct, each commercial transaction
we undertake, and every location we
visit. These capabilities may lead to
negative effects on individuals, groups
and even society as it chills action,
excludes and discriminates. They
also affect how we think about the
relationships between the individual,
markets, society and the state. If the
situation arises where institutions
we rely upon can come to know us
to such a degree so as to be able to
peer into our histories, observe all our
actions and predict our future actions,
even greater power imbalances will
emerge where individual autonomy
in the face of companies, groups,
and governments will effectively
disappear and any deemed aberrant
behaviour identified, excluded and
even quashed.
Perhaps the most significant challenge
to privacy is that the right can be
compromised without the individual
being aware. With other rights, you
are aware of the interference – being
detained, censored, or restrained. With
other rights, you are also aware of the
