Privacy as the Enemy

Full Title or Meme

No right, especially a right so nebulous as privacy, is absolute. Privacy as the Enemy discusses some of the pathology of too much privacy.

Context

• Privacy was unknown in tribal society. If you wanted to be alone, you would just walk away from the group, and rejoin when you were ready. The wiki page Privacy deals in more detail with the concept from the 1880's to the current time.
• The tension between individual rights an Civil Society is not new, it was understood by the ancient Greeks and the enlightenment philosophers.

Problems

Rather than discuss the theoretical or philosophical challenges of privacy, this section will simply outline some of the challenges that are faced in a modern technologically sophisticated society.

• When NIV/AIDS was first diagnosed, it was a major social stigma. Old public health solutions did not result in any significant level of control of the disease. It was found in this case that more privacy for the victims resulted in better outcomes.
• Now with the advent of HIPAA and COPPA, the user has legal rights to keep certain classes of data private.