Questions from a nephew to an uncle
My nephew, Zac, is completing a dissertation on privacy for his final degree work. He asked me six questions as part of this study.
Q) At its most basic level what does the right to privacy mean to you, what are its constituents?
A) To me, the right to privacy implies my right to manage and control access to information about me in order that is not used harmfully against me by any individual or organisation.
Q) Is this concept of privacy transferable to the realm of cyberspace? Are our real world rights to privacy equivalent our digital world rights?
A) Yes, they are. Or at least they should be. For reasons which are apparent, privacy rights are much harder to monitor and enforce in the digital world than they are in the real world where as we know privacy protection is not that well managed anyway.
Q) Should privacy be for sale or protected by statute? Do you favour the US system of market correction or the European system of regulation and protection?
A) The instinctive reaction is to say that, if done really well, either would do! But in reality what will happen and what is probably preferable will be a mixture of the two with a preference towards the European approach even though it tends to be fragmented across different member states of the EU.
Q) It has been argued by many that we live in a culture we trade-off our privacy for convenience and luxury, does the nature of the internet exacerbate this issue, and if so do you feel it will be a permanent feature within the privacy debate?
A) The Internet and networking in general certainly do exacerbate the tendency towards convenience and ‘ease of use’ which mitigates against some of the natural controls over privacy infringement in the non-digital world.
- Posted by davidg on 21/04/2006.
- davidg's site
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