Let’s Not Rejoice Over the Death of Privacy Just Yet

In an article on CNET.com called “Why No One Cares About Privacy Anymore,” Declan McCullagh celebrates (I don’t think that’s too strong a word) the changing mores and advancing technology that seem to be turning the idea of privacy into a quaintly passe concept. Noting that the anticipated storm of privacy objections to Google Buzz have simply not materialized, McCullagh suggests that people, particularly young people, just aren’t all that worked up over the idea that the world knows their business. “Internet users have grown accustomed to informational exhibitionism,” he writes. “Norms are changing, with confidentiality giving way to openness. Participating in YouTube, Loopt, FriendFeed, Flickr, and other elements of modern digital society means giving up some privacy, yet millions of people are willing to make that trade-off every day. Of people with an online profile, nearly 40 percent have disabled privacy settings so anyone may view it, according to a Pew Internet survey released a year ago. The percentage is probably higher today.” McCullagh quotes the Judge Richard Posner, a conservative political theorist, who has written “As a social good, I think privacy is greatly overrated because privacy basically means concealment. People conceal things in order to fool other people about them. They want to appear healthier than they are, smarter, more honest and so forth.” The truth about privacy is counter-intuitive, McCullagh concludes: “Less of it can lead to a more virtuous society.”

In many ways, this is certainly true. It always seemed astonishing that homosexuals were denied security clearances during the Cold War because their secret left them susceptible to blackmail. During my parents’ generation, people kept secrets about all sorts of things because social stigmas were attached: a drinking problem, an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, mental retardation in the following, a marriage outside of one’s race/religion/ethnic group. People have gotten over most of these things. We feel better because because we can lead lives that are more free and more honest.

And yet, there is still much we would resent having put on public display. Who among the exhibitionists would like to have the details of his finances spread across the globe? And while Tiger Woods, Eliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford and others have given infidelity a bad name, do we really feel that people are not entitled to keep their romantic liaisons to themselves, free from community judgment? But what is really important to realize that we are not always in control of the things we need to be private about. Just last week, Liz Cheney, daughter of the Great Scaremonger Dick Cheney, and an odious person in her own right, spearheaded an effort to attack the Department of Justice lawyers who represented accused members of al Qaeda who were in detention. Now, these lawyers were not performing this entirely professional action in secret, so the parallel is not exact, but all of sudden, here they were doing their jobs in relative anonymity, and now a public rabble-rouser is accusing them helping America’s enemies, which certainly sounds like the definition of treason to me. A perfectly normal, yea, even admirable activity has now been spotlighted and stigmatized, and if you think it’s impossible that a right wng nut will one day take a shot at one of these lawyers, then I envy your peace of mind. It may be a better world that doesn’t require so much privacy, but in the meantime, it’s a pretty good protection against hysteria and malevolence.