Arguing For Privacy’s Sake

Last Sunday’s New York Times Week in Review had featured an article concerning privacy in the modern world - physical, digital, or otherwise. I must say it sparked a few thoughts, particularly ones to do with our Web-based selves. So I thought I’d share with you today a few points of my own about the matter.

For starters, I’d like it to be known that I’m “pro privacy.” I believe everyone is entitled some personal space and some peace of mind. Despite the human propensity for voyeurism – which is rooted in our fundamental tendency to be curious and knowledge-seeking – people enjoy having secrets, knowing things others do not. (Not to any large degree, anyway.) Such “pieces of life,” or whatever you wish to call them, make for an interesting world, I think. They make each and every one of us intriguing in our own way. If our race were genetically or habitually structured otherwise, we’d be thoroughly bored with the world, wouldn’t you agree?

Therefore it’s deeply flawed, I suspect, to even imagine that our online personas, whether they be involved with social networks of various sorts (or whatever else might be of one’s interest), are in any way acceptably vulnerable to public inspection.

Yes, we declare ourselves open to others on the Web more so than we really ever have in the past, and do enjoy socializing via our computer screens and so forth, but to think we somehow wish to divest ourselves of our privacy rights for the sake of uber-connectness is simply ridiculous.

How have I arrived at such a conclusion? Because of the overwhelming evidence that shows we merely upload facades to the digital space. (In many cases, faux facades.) Ask yourself, do you presume that, on the whole, we designate our true ages in our profiles? Rarely, I presume. How about our names, our professions, our histories? I very much doubt our full resumes, especially those to do with our personal lives, are displayed for all to examine.

Why the lying, why the fakery, why the omission? Protection, of course. Privacy protection. We know that to divulge every bit would be irresponsible. Quite stupid, for sure. Whether one has a profile on MySpace or Facebook or some other such network, there are things one simply does not disclose, for a myriad of reasons, all of which I won’t bother to attempt to point out, for the fact that you’d grow incredibly annoyed at me for doing so, and for the fact that I think it would be a waste of my time.

But you get the picture. Which is that we do not tell all. Because we enjoy not telling all. We keep things to ourselves, for ourselves. In order that we retain our identities.

So all this talk about privacy, about whether we care for it these days or not, about whether we lackadaisically give it away to get something else in return, is completely baseless. Of course we care. If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t be you. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be me. We want privacy.

The only meaningful thing that we need to really discuss honestly now is whether we can expect ourselves to be sold without our knowing consent. Which is what a great many people fear today.

Hence the fakery.

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