What Is Privacy?
I recently read an article about Facebook by Michael Duffy for Time Magazine. The article is about websites like Facebook and MySpace and the time-vortex they create for millions of teens across America.
The entire article is interesting, but one sentence stopped me mid-read: Generation M: teenagers think their lives are private just so long as their parents aren’t tuning in.
Duffy was talking about Facebook “Walls” (bulletin boards for each user that are accessible by anyone attending their school). These are open to viewing by anyone going to that school. So if you go to a large university, you could have 20 thousand strangers reading this. Duffy brings up an interesting point that teens are totally okay with this. But the second a parent looks at the wall, most teens will cry about privacy. Why is that?
The reason, I think, is because privacy isn’t The quality or condition of being secluded from the presence or view of others.
- as the “American Heritage Dictionary” would have us believe. It’s not even Freedom from unauthorized intrusion
- as “Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Law” defines it. In fact, not even the ever-so-prestigious “Free On-line Dictionary of Computing” gets it right: Where only the intended recipients can read a message.
.
See, teens don’t mind certain “others” from viewing them, so American Heritage is out. But they don’t actually “authorize” those 20 thousand strangers from viewing their Wall, so Merrian and Webster lose, too. And since they don’t know any of the people who will inevitably view their Wall, the On-line Dictionary is false as well.
So what is privacy?
As defined by Sumeet Jain, privacy is Maintaining power over those individuals who you would like to keep in the dark.
This definition strikes at the heart of what privacy really means to people. It’s not about letting only certain people know about you. It’s about making sure certain people don’t know about you.
This is why teens are okay with random college kids viewing their Wall but not okay with their parents viewing it.
And we can extend this to forums greater than college campuses and private homes, too. I’d argue that this is even the reason we want privacy from our government. It’s not that we want to hide information. The fact of the matter is that we want to have something government doesn’t. Most people’s phone records probably don’t have very provactive information in them. And if we willingly turned them in to the Feds, we probably wouldn’t hear back from them because they didn’t find anything of consequence. But despite the insignificance of phone records, we will let loose the dogs of war if Bush and Co. try to take them from us. Why? Because we need that power.
It’s all about power.
Add comment March 21st, 2006