Why Privacy is Important
August 8, 2006 – 9:54 pmI was talking to a friend of mine a few weeks ago and the topic of privacy vs. government protection came up. I made some remark about Federal Air Marshal quota fiasco and the NSA wiretapping scandal and the general gist of the other side of conversation went along the lines of, “Well, they’re just trying to protect us. I’ve got nothing to hide, I’m ok with it.”
While my friend said they understood where I was coming from, it’s hard to understand how they DON’T have a problem with everything that’s going on. Privacy is one of our basic freedoms, take that away, and it’s going to seem a lot more like 1984.
If you’re interested, or want to read a very good, abet long, essay on the topic, check out George Radwanski’s, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, annual report from a few years ago. Favorite quote below.
If information that is actually about someone else is wrongly applied to us, if wrong facts make it appear that we’ve done things we haven’t, if perfectly innocent behavior is misinterpreted as suspicious because authorities don’t know our reasons or our circumstances, we will be at risk of finding ourselves in trouble in a society where everyone is regarded as a suspect.
Decisions detrimental to us may be made on the basis of wrong facts, incomplete or out-of-context information or incorrect assumptions, without our ever having the chance to find out about it, let alone to set the record straight.
That possibility alone will, over time, make us increasingly think twice about what we do, where we go, with whom we associate, because we will learn to be concerned about how it might look to the ubiquitous watchers of the state.
Now, remember this is Canada, not the US, but you can see the similarities.
3 Responses to “Why Privacy is Important”
I have nothing to hide either. What I do is simply none of their damned business.
Let’s go further – I just came up with a dandy way to deal with that “I have nothing to hide” routine.
We come up with a system to assign everyone a vice. The vice need not be illegal but should be something you’d blush over if published in the paper. Now that everyone has something they’d like to keep from the neighbors we all have a vested interest in TOR, PGP, keeping private affairs private and so on.
By Brian on Aug 9, 2006
I enjoy reading about the games of cat and mouse played by the G-men vs the Constitution, but they do not scare me nearly as much as the breaches on our freedoms perpretrated by private corporations(read RIAA etc.)
The lawsuits being slapped on random people, regardless of their ‘guilt’, and based upon dubiously provable and extremely suspect tracking technologies can ruin a persons life far worse than the Governement can. Remember, there are appeals from prison, but none from a lawsuit. You can beat suspicion of terrorism, but you cannot easily get out of millions of dollers in debt.
By Mike Brown on Aug 13, 2006