I'm reading Shoshanna Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism at the moment and the thing I realized is that I don't fully grasp what privacy is. I mean I know abstractly what it is, but I don't feel it strongly. Or perhaps what I mean is that it's so deep down, so complete a part of me that I don't recognize it as a distinct thing.
She tells a story about a small town in England who tried to stop the Google Streetview car coming through and I thought to myself "what were they actually feeling"? Because I doubt I would have felt that as pertaining to my privacy and yet of course it is.
I think a lot of people like me find it hard to quantify what that thing is and where their boundaries for it are and as a result we are obviously wide open to having it exploited.
The Wikipedia opening line is interesting:
"Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively." [1]
Other dictionary definitions:
"someone's right to keep their personal matters and relationships secret" [2]
Now personally I think privacy != secrecy. It's more like obscurity or vagueness or indeterminacy. Like not being pinned down, rather than having any specific information hidden.
"A state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people" [3]
I think that's a bit closer but it lacks the idea from Wikipedia of "being able to expression themselves selectively"...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy
[2] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/privacy
[3] https://www.lexico.com/definition/privacy
She tells a story about a small town in England who tried to stop the Google Streetview car coming through and I thought to myself "what were they actually feeling"? Because I doubt I would have felt that as pertaining to my privacy and yet of course it is.
I think a lot of people like me find it hard to quantify what that thing is and where their boundaries for it are and as a result we are obviously wide open to having it exploited.
The Wikipedia opening line is interesting:
"Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively." [1]
Other dictionary definitions:
"someone's right to keep their personal matters and relationships secret" [2]
Now personally I think privacy != secrecy. It's more like obscurity or vagueness or indeterminacy. Like not being pinned down, rather than having any specific information hidden.
"A state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people" [3]
I think that's a bit closer but it lacks the idea from Wikipedia of "being able to expression themselves selectively"...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy
[2] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/privacy
[3] https://www.lexico.com/definition/privacy