I think it is of course important from a psychological perspective. More than privacy, no matter how small a person's habits or slight emotions reflect his psychology, only the information expressed is very different. There is no such difference that can be valued or despised. For a person with a mental illness, some information is an expression of the illness. Humans have no psychology that is “excessive”. The psychological mechanism of humans is so precise and efficient that it probably exceeds that of any machine. It always generates a change to respond to a stimulus from the outside world, using one response to the other until Achieve balance. It is difficult for people to be the same, so when facing anyone, we do n’t have to be surprised how many weights are piled on one end of this balance. The serious thing is whether this additional balance is down or about to fall. In addition, people need to fully respect their own emotions and the emotions of others. Failure to take care of emotions is the source of everything you can imagine. This is also humanism.
(Text / Daniel Solefer) Many people don't care about the government's collection and analysis of personal information: I don't have anything to hide, I like to check it out; people who have done bad things need to be afraid, let alone, if they have really done bad things , Then it should be revealed.
According to Bruce Schneier, a data security expert, and Geoffrey Stone, a legal scholar, this "brilliant theory" of "doing nothing wrong, not afraid of ghost knocking on the door" is often used As a "three axes" for privacy, the most extreme performance is: what is privacy, everything must give way to security.
The shadow of this argument can be seen everywhere. The British government has installed millions of surveillance cameras in many towns, which are monitored by the Commissioner via closed-circuit television. The government ’s slogan is "As long as you are upright, there is nothing to fear". [1] Similar remarks frequently appear on various media such as blogs, letters from readers, and news interviews. An American even declared on a blog: "I do n’t mind people looking at my personal information, I have nothing to hide! That ’s why I want to support [government agencies] listening to phone records to investigate terrorists."
This statement did not appear in the last two years. The characters in Henry James ’novels in 1888 [2] once said:" If these people do bad things, they should be ashamed, and he need not pity them; If they have n’t done anything bad, then it ’s a little fuss.
Why is privacy important?
On the surface, this question is easy to refute, because no matter how glorious people are, they do not want to be known. Russian writer Solzhenitsyn once said: "Everyone is guilty or has something to hide; as long as you dig deep enough, you will be able to find it out." [3] Canadian privacy expert David Fleue David Flaherty also said: "Those who claim to have no" privacy ", as long as you ask some private questions, will surrender in less than 3 minutes."
However, this refutation is not convincing because it targets extreme situations such as taking nude photos and disclosing secrets. This kind of information is neither collected by the government nor known to outsiders. If the other party is softer and only says that personal privacy is subject to public safety needs, it will become very difficult to refute. But in any case, the theory of openness is wrong. It misunderstands privacy and its value.
The philosopher John Duwy said, "Put the right question and half of the problem will be solved." Let's first discuss what privacy is.
What is privacy?
Many people understand privacy by defining its essence, finding out the core value of privacy, or seeing what the things that fall under the name of "privacy" have in common. But the complexity of privacy lies in that it cannot come down to a single essence. It is a complex of many different but similar things.
Disclosing the deepest secret in your heart is a violation of privacy; someone peeping at you also violates privacy. The damage of the former is that the information you want to hide is learned by others, and even if the latter does not disclose any sensitive information about you, it will make you feel creepy. In addition, privacy violations also include extortion and misuse of personal information. The establishment of your detailed files by the government is also a violation of privacy.
In many cases, courts and legislatures in the United States are not aware that certain issues involve privacy, because that is inconsistent with their definition of privacy. But in any case, these are problems after all and deserve our attention.
What constitutes a violation of privacy?
When it comes to the problems arising from the collection and use of information, many people will borrow the metaphors in George Orwell's "1984". Orwell portrays a repressive totalitarian society in the book: The government, codenamed "Big Brother", perpetually monitors the people. But this metaphor only applies to government surveillance of citizens, and most of today's personal data, such as race, birthday, gender, address, and marital status, are no longer particularly sensitive information. Many people will not deliberately conceal which hotel they have stayed in, which car they have driven, and what drinks they like to drink. Even if someone knows it, most people do n’t feel embarrassed or depressed.
The other is a Kafka-style metaphor. In Kafka's novel "Trial", the protagonist was arrested for unknown reasons. He only knows that a mysterious court has his own data and is investigating himself, and why he has to be investigated and what information is under control is unknown. The government in the novel holds personal information and decides the personal destiny of citizens accordingly. This is not a monitoring issue, but is related to the processing, storage, use and analysis of information, so it is more suitable for what we say here. It not only brings a sense of helplessness and powerlessness to individuals, but also changes the power relationship between individuals and social institutions.
Laws and policies always pay too much attention to Orwellian surveillance and ignore the information processing problem in the Kafka context. To refute the open-mindedness, people first thought of "what to hide". In this regard, the computer security expert Schneier's commentary: The bright theory is based on the premise of "privacy, that is, concealing unethical behavior", but this is not the case.
As mentioned earlier, privacy violations are not only Orwellian, but also Kafka. The individual's weakness and fragility in the "Trial" come from the monopoly and opacity of information, which is a precise interpretation of the indifference, abuse of power, and weak accountability of the authority.
Going a little deeper, you will find that the brilliant theory defines "infringement of privacy" as a profound injury. Ironically, sometimes even those who advocate privacy protection think so. Ann Bartow, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, said: In order to foster a true consensus, "privacy issues cannot be just disturbing, they must bring pain to people's lives"; the battle for privacy protection It is "one will succeed in a thousand bones." Barto's argument makes some sense, but by this standard, I am afraid there are few privacy issues left. Privacy is not a horror movie, there is not so much bloodshed and dead bones, and many injuries are invisible.
What if privacy is violated?
And the damage caused by it is called "combination effect". For example, if you bought a book on cancer, there is no problem in itself, maybe you are just interested in it. Another example is that you bought another wig, which may also be for a variety of reasons. But by combining the two, you can conclude that you are a cancer patient undergoing chemotherapy. In this way, whether to disclose this information is actually not up to you.
Another type of injury is what I call the "isolation effect". Many US national security programs have established huge personal information databases, but for confidentiality reasons, people are not allowed to know the information or correct errors. This is actually a system issue that violates individual rights, resulting in unequal power between government agencies and individual citizens.
In addition, there are secondary uses of information and information asymmetry-will your personal information be used for other purposes? Can personal information collected according to fixed standards reflect a person's true information? For example, if a person buys several books for making methamphetamine, the government may suspect that he is making stimulants, but in fact this is just what he uses for writing novels. When he bought the book, he did not expect how suspicious the book would appear to the government. His purchase record did not reveal the reason why he bought the book. Should he be worried about it? Even if he did nothing wrong, perhaps he would like to hide these records from the government, because the government may draw wrong inferences based on these records.
From financial markets to social networking sites to government agencies, this problem arises where digital systems become control tools. The digital age has brought us perhaps the greatest unprecedented liberation since the invention of printing, and at the same time it has seriously threatened the concept of freedom itself. ——Frank Silmacher
Privacy is usually not lost overnight, but it is eaten up little by little over time, waiting for you to wake up and the trend is gone. The US government can start by monitoring your phone communication records, and then monitor some calls, then install more public cameras, and finally form a sophisticated surveillance network involving satellites; or start by analyzing your bank records, and then expand to credit card records, Network service provider records, medical health records, employment records, etc. You do n’t care about every small step, but one day your personal information will be completely controlled by the government.
At that time, it is not whether you are upright, but whether the relevant departments will publish your information, will you be blacklisted because of your unusual behavior, will ban you from flying, account freezing, etc .; Or you may not be able to protect your information, be stolen by a third party and defraud you. Brightness will also cause trouble. Others will say: "The government will not intentionally harm us." Yes in most cases, but it is inevitable that there will be unintentional harm caused by negligence and mistakes.
The open-minded argument only deals with certain privacy issues, understanding privacy narrowly and avoiding the derivative issues of the US government's security plan. At first glance it sounds reasonable and well-founded, but in the face of problems other than surveillance and information disclosure, it can only be speechless after all.
[Editor's note] The author of this article, Daniel J. Solove, is a law professor at George Washington University. The original text is taken from its upcoming new book " Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security ". This article involves related discussions and does not mean supporting the author's point of view.
