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Privacy is only about 100 years old as either a legal or political issue. Throughout its entire existence, it has been a deeply contested concept as representative readings in Shoeman's 1984 collection Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy clearly show. Recently, Internet privacy has become an immensely popular subject of public discussion. It seems as though everyone, from policy makers to expert consultants and the news media, has been working overtime to raise the alarm over new surveillance and information gathering technologies that have been identified as threats to privacy.
There are two main themes to most of the reports. The first one identifies a particular threat, discusses its implications and ends with proposals for some kind of legislation to address the problem. The second theme follows a similar course except, instead of suggested legislation, there follows a pitch for some new product or technology.
While all of this work is interesting and thoughtful, it often fails to accomplish anything useful because it is too reliant on bureaucracy, is overly broad and inflexible or is simply too much trouble to use. What the current debate on privacy overlooks is that privacy is a deeply personal issue and that any given individual's privacy preferences are constantly changing. People often make split-second cost/benefit analyses in which they weigh their privacy against other desirable goods. Neither law nor design can truly adapt or evolve fast enough to keep up with the rapidly changing environment. At best, current privacy laws and software systems restrict freedom of choice and hinder commercial activity.
Rather than approaching privacy from the security perspective of "threats" and "intrusions," this article takes an individualized approach. Instead of talking about privacy in terms of outsiders trying to get in, it makes sense to look at privacy from the inside out. The central question in this approach is What information is leaving me as I am in the process of seeking information? We expect that we reveal a great deal about ourselves in everyday interactions. "Merely by walking outdoors, we put ourselves in the public domain," as Sanchez points out in The Privacy Cage (www.liberzine.com/juliansanchez/010205privacy.htm). In other words, there is a natural tendency for us to constantly shed information about ourselves, whether it is in the physical world or...