The recent technologies from computers’ network, world wide web, to security cameras, lead to a public space enlargement, more precisely: information about persons that were, in the past, known only by a few (close friends and family), become, nowadays, available to anyone who has an interest in finding them. From the perspective of the classic-liberal theory, this enlargement raises some question, because the distinction between public and private plays an important role in the theory. For instance, Judith N. Shklar, in “Liberalism of Fear”, writes:
<<Liberalism … as a strictly political theory is not necessarily linked to any one religious or scientific doctrine, though it is psychologically more compatible with some rather than with others. It must reject only those political doctrines that do not recognize any difference between spheres of the personal and the public. Because of the primacy of toleration as the irreducible limit on public agents, liberals must always draw such a line. This is not historically a permanent or unalterable boundary, but it does require that every public policy be considered with this separation in mind and be consciously defended as meeting its most severe current standard.
The important point for liberalism is not so much where the line is drawn, as that it must be drawn, and that it must under no circumstances be ignored or forgotten. The limits of coercion begin, though they do not end, with a prohibition upon invading the private realm, which originally was a matter of religious faith, but which has changed and will go on changing as objects of belief and the sense of privacy alter in response to the technological and military character of governments and the productive relationships that prevail. It is a shifting line, but not an erasable one, and it leaves liberals free to espouse a very large range of philosophical and religious beliefs.>>
The way in which the liberal theory is applied in the new context is not evident. The public-private liberal distinction has meaning from the point of view of physical property’s rights, while the recent technological evolution is rather understood from the point of view of public-secret distinction, referring to information. The situation with which we are confronted is not as much about restricting the private property in favour of public property enlargement, as about the individual’s incapacity of maintaining, as they did until now, different identities adapted to a context or other of their lives. For instance, the employers take into consideration the Facebook photos of employee X, in which he is drunk at a party that had place last summer (photos posted by the employee X friends); assurance companies want to have access to your whole medical history ( which is supposed to be confidential); undemocratic governments are infiltrating in the social networks and are detaining the opponents before they can actually do something; democratic governments collect the citizens’ personal data in order to make the social protection and citizens’ safety more efficient, but they can’t guarantee that this data are not used (with or without the institutions’ agreement) for other purposes.
Paul Ohm, in “Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization” argued that maintaining the private data confidential is, technically, impossible and unrealistic. The guarantee of the personal data’s privacy through contract may be a promise which is made in vain. As the public politics regarding the informational technologies have to also take in consideration this fact. And the idea of giving to people “copyright” over their personal data may not be the optimum approach.
What will be the problem if all information will be made public? James Grimmelmann, in “Accidental Privacy Spills” makes the following remark:
<<On a technical level, privacy and copyright are isomorphic problems. Information is to be shared with certain people and not with others. From this observation have come some interesting ideas. … But this overlap has unfortunate consequences, as well, because many people’s ethical intuitions cut very differently across these two problems. A technically consistent pair of responses to them may feel wildly inconsistent as a matter of right and wrong. If credit-card databases were trivially available on major BitTorrent trackers, how many people who now believe in file-sharing would demand a complete ban on BitTorrent?
The conventional distinction between privacy and copyright is that the information is used in different ways. Copyright violations tend to involve many individuals violating the rights of a few large entities; privacy violations often reverse this picture. This asymmetry makes it possible to enforce privacy protections. You could stop the NSA in its tracks by prohibiting them from maintaining the wrong sort of database. You could go out, find major commercial violators, and slap them with big fines. The traditional privacy violator invades privacy wholeseale; “copyright infringement” today often connotes something much more individualistic.>>
Friday, 5th March, Vlad Tarko and Constantin Vica talk about the possible, negative consequences of the impossibility of maintaining personal data confidential- confidential as regards the governments, but also as regards private organizations (either commercial, or non-profit: e.g. religious), and about the outcomes of the surveillance technologies’ generalization.
David Brin, „The Transparent Society” (optional).
