Privacy is everything related to the personal life of each person and that must be kept in an intimate and secret way. An individual has the right to have privacy in their life that is to say that the person can perform actions that not necessarily, have to share with others. This right to privacy is contemplated in the global declaration of human rights and therefore must be respected by all. Each subject has the freedom to choose who they want to share their privacy with; It should be noted that the word privacy is also seen as a synonym of intimacy. A true friendship can promote the fact that two people want to share their privacy, their emotions, and their experiences. Each and every human being needs to have fellow travelers, that is, someone who serves as a witness to their many experiences, their joys, their sorrows, as well as their successes or failures.
The concept of private must demonstrate the confidentiality of certain things. Showing respect for the privacy of others is very important, even within the family, that is, not because you are the father or mother of a young person you have the right to read their text messages or check their diary stuff, etc. As their children are, parents must understand that young people, especially teenagers, have their privacy and that they must be respected. Nowadays people are more open to show their privacy, this is due to the appearance of so-called social networks, where everyone can share photos and even thoughts on the networks. However, with this you must have some caution, especially in relation to the photos that are shared, there are many malicious people who could make a misuse of them. They should be taught, especially to young people, that they should be careful with the photos they upload and with the information that they divulge on the internet.
Privacy issues associated with government surveillance
Often, the answer to concerns about the privacy of our data is that “those who do not break the law have nothing to begrudge”, we have nothing to fear from massive data collection. Privacy, finally is only a problem of old cons. What does it matter if the surveillance cameras film us, if our communications are listened to, if our activities are recorded, if our movements are monitored, if our purchases are traced: the good citizens, employees, consumers that we are have nothing to blame ourselves for this generalized surveillance which is intended only to thwart those who circumvent the common rules, those who attack our collective security. This is the well-known argument of the hunt for terrorists, pirates, hackers, spammers, deviants that allows the monitoring of all communications, filtering and clamping the Internet or control of movement.
The argument balances two entities that do not have the same weight: on one hand, there is the citizen, on the other he has the executive power; on one hand, there is the employee, on the other the employer; on one hand, there is the consumer, on the other the merchant or the banker. On one side, there is the weak, on the other, the strong. People who make decisions for us, who can change the rules unilaterally, who can consider us as good or bad customers, good or bad "risks", who manage conflicts of interest for us on the basis of information they have, information that may be incorrect, or even information that we do not know they have. The relationship proposed in the argument of “I have nothing to hide because I do not break the rule” is always unequal, inequitable. So it is not only the government or the administration that we expect respect for our privacy, but also of all those who have power over us: our employer, our competitors, and our neighbor’s maybe. Well even we would denounce all our activities on the public square of social sites for friends, acquaintances, relations we do not want to leave to the care of organizations, on which we have not taken, to manage the rules that govern our lives.
The danger is not the general monitoring, but the absurdness of an oppressive society. It is true that the telephone numbers that one composes on one's mobile or the very content of these conversations are often not considered as intimate. Even if the collection and the exploitation of this information would reveal intimate things, the people have the impression that only duly authorized people (who are supposed to be concerned about the dignity of citizens) or computer programs will have access to them. And then, the value of security often seems greater than that of privacy: while the value of privacy is low (because the information is not very sensitive as a whole), that of security is strong (and sensitive for all). In this scale the arguments do not have the same weight. But the problems that a generalized practice of collecting information is in fact of a different nature. To put it simply: how can one be sure of having nothing to reproach? And if the rules changed? And if several people who have power over us interpreted them differently, or applied different rules? And if, above all, one could never be certain who applies which rules, and in what way? In such a case, the problem posed by the misuse of personal data is not so much the objective loss of certain freedoms as the destruction of social trust and, as a result, a generalized inhibition: we no longer dare to invent, joking, transgressing, trying, criticizing. Lest someone we do not know may someday come to blame us for mysterious reasons.
In other words, the " nothing to hide " argument is based on a conception of privacy as an individual right that interferes or conflicts with the common good or other types of social interests. But the above shows, that the interests of the individual and of society are not necessarily distinct. Civil liberties, the protection of the individual, the respect of his person, form the bases of a certain form of social bond, of a substratum of confidence which allows society to function. Private life is then not a way out of social control, but is a form of social control that emerges from the norms of society. “Private life has social value, and even when it protects the individual, it does so for the good of society".
The issue of privacy is the democratic tension between the fort and the low
Not all privacy issues are equal. We need to understand privacy in a pluralistic way. For the vast majority of people, their activities are neither illegal nor embarrassing. But privacy is not about hiding shady things, for example, limiting access to personal information. However, data surveillance comprises of a precise utilization of individual data frameworks to examine or screen the activities or communications of individuals. The issue in surveillance and data mining programs is that we don't know precisely what it is about us, what data is utilized, and for what reason, the issue lies less in the checking of the data itself as in the frailty and defenselessness made by this misuse, which rejects the data subject from the procedure that worries him in any case.
This sort of data surveillance represents a structural problem in the manner in which individuals are treated by establishments by making an imbalance between the intensity of people and that of the power that gathers data. It essentially brings up issues about the intensity of the organizations and associations that play our data, just like the case for instance with the reuse of our data, for an unexpected reason in comparison to that for which they have gathered, without the assent of the general population. The fact that a government has to justify itself in court, for example, to use certain data or record conversations, makes it possible to know what it is doing and puts legal limitations on what it can or cannot do. On the other hand, the private life is more and more put under observation by small data that add up to each other, intersect and multiply and, of these, we have no knowledge. The "nothing to hide" argument is needed to rule out other privacy issues raised by government oversight or data mining programs, forcing the debate to focus on one design. However, with the majority of protection issues brought about by data accumulation and their utilization past surveillance and divulgence, the contention of nothing to stow away, at last, has nothing to state.
It is therefore in a democratic tension, in a balance of power but also in confidence that the confidentiality of the data and the respect of privacy are situated. Rather than acting in the short term and with greed, seeking to restrict freedoms through the development of generalized surveillance tools, we rather need the rules and remedies are better established. If we want to make mass collection, develop video surveillance, record all the movements of each, develop the file, it is essential that in return we have better access to data collection, better guarantees of the rules that govern the processes so that they cannot be changed unilaterally for example, better assurances and protections regarding the dissemination or the invasion. It is clear that our societies do not take the path.
History leaves no doubt that the purpose of state surveillance the exercise of coercion and control over the whole society. The problem is that surveillance not only promotes conformity, but also mistrust and fear. A government that monitors its people creates a climate in which people feel compelled but not really motivated to cooperate with the authorities. However, both at work and in governance, trust between employee’s citizens on the one hand and bosses, government on the other hand is a key element for people's free will to cooperate. People want to hide all sorts of things from the public, even if they do not do anything "bad" at all. Privacy is essential for a wide range of human activities. If someone calls a suicidal hotline, visits an abortion clinic, or keeps calling a pornographic website, when a whistleblower contacts a journalist, there are many reasons to keep such behavior secret, even though it is by no means illegal. In short, everyone has something to hide.
To renounce one's own privacy in order to achieve supposedly absolute certainty is just as damaging to the healthy development of the individual as it is to the political culture. For the individual, the overemphasis of safety means a life of paralysis and fear; it would amount to never being able to use a car or a plane, never doing anything that involves a risk, never being able to put the quality of life above quantity, and paying any price to avoid dangers.
Conclusion
There is no doubt about the benefits that technology brings with it; however, any technological breakthrough also carries risks. Despite this, the benefits weigh the dangers. At the end of the day, no technology can be classified as good or bad, everything depends on the use that is given to it. The motivations to do good or evil depend on each person, a given technology can always fall into unwanted hands, or irresponsible. With the arrival of the Internet many things changed. The network democratized communications and information. This caused that much of the things we do were transferred to the digital world: a binary world, of zero’s and ones, the transition took less than a decade. Personal data, banking transactions, procedures before public entities, purchasing habits, preferences, affinities, affiliations, and a large number of details of aspects related to what we do, circulate on the web. All with our consent, although we have not given time to meditate on it, as a result of that habit of not paying more attention to the terms of use that we end up accepting when we access this or that service on the web.
Our data, provided on a voluntary basis, are housed in server farms that we have no idea where they are located. The era of digital information brought with it a serious problem for our privacy, which we have ignored until now, either because we have not taken into account its possible repercussions or simply because we prefer not to attach too much importance to this topic. Maybe we think that our information is unimportant or inconsequential, so that someone else is behind it. The truth is that every time we surf the Internet we leave an unequivocal trace of the sites we visit and what we do in them, data that is very valuable for commercial companies in the first instance. It is no longer surprising that our interest for a certain good or service has just been expressed, immediately afterwards, while we are browsing other sites, we are shown advertising related to those goods or services. In this way companies build a profile for each person, based on browsing habits, purchases and payment methods. Thus, immense databases are being built that corporations use for their benefit, and that are also susceptible to be sold to other companies. The information that hundreds, thousands or millions of people inadvertently leave behind is transformed into tons of data quantified in terabytes that acquire an extremely precious value.
If this is not enough to alarm us, what to say when to this state of permanent monitoring of what we do in the network we add the intervention of governments and state agencies. The repercussions then acquire another level, much more dangerous and threatening our privacy. The surveillance capacity of powerful nations sometimes equals or exceeds those more sinister conspiracy theories. The idea of an omnipresent State, that watches, listens and finds out about everything its citizens do, leaves the literary genre of fiction and establishes itself in the world of today.
References
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Lyon, David, and Elia Zureik, eds. Computers, surveillance, and privacy. U of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Marthews, Alex, and Catherine E. Tucker. "Government surveillance and internet search behavior." Available at SSRN 2412564 (2017).
Solove, Daniel J. "I've got nothing to hide and other misunderstandings of privacy." San Diego L. Rev. 44 (2007): 745.
Solove, Daniel J. "Why privacy matters even if you have ‘nothing to hide’." Chronicle of Higher Education 15 (2011).
Whitaker, Reg, and Reginald Whitaker. The end of privacy: How total surveillance is becoming a reality. New Press, 2000.
