Taking privacy to the next level (2012-10-10)

February 19, 2015  3504  3504   

One of the most challenging aspects of privacy is that it means different things to different people.  It was characterised in 1890 by a (then) future United States Supreme Court Justice[1] as the ‘right to be let alone’, however, this definition is too broad and vague to be usefully applied. Privacy has also been described in terms of guarding that which is ‘intimate’ about oneself, and yet this definition is too narrow, as much information about oneself may be considered private, and yet not intimate. Perhaps one of the more useful ways of understanding privacy is to think of it as an interrelated and overlapping set of concepts with significant similarities.  A prominent US legal scholar has made this argument,[2] and created a taxonomy of privacy encompassing four categories of privacy violations: information collection, information processing, information dissemination, and invasion.

Privacy today is held to be a basic human right, as articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in the Constitution of South Africa.  In this context, privacy is viewed as a fundamental element of human dignity and autonomy.  Drawing on this perspective, one can understand privacy as the right to be free of observation (or even the fear of observation, which has been demonstrated to alter peoples’ behaviours), as well as the right to control the collection, use, retention, and dissemination of information about oneself. Privacy, therefore, in a democratic and free society, has intrinsic social value – and yet, privacy is not an absolute value unto itself. It is a right that must be balanced against other societal needs and values, such as security.  If one considers the value of closed-circuit television (CCTV), for example, in public safety, one understands that the sacrifice of personal privacy might under certain circumstances be necessary.

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