I was having a rant with a colleague the other day about privacy and anonymity. It started with a comment that the Aussies were in a tizzy because the government was going to make it legal for businesses to monitor employee’s email. I was reminding my friend (who didn’t need reminding) that it’s been that way in the USA for years. Your communications and actions have no expectation of privacy in the US workplace.

In the biz, we define Privacy as the release of personally identifiable information. But that’s not the way most people think about it. Most people divide their world into three buckets:

• Things they do alone
• Things they do with selected others
• Things they do in public

And, no they don’t ‘consciously’ segment this way, but it does describe their basic understanding.

Things done alone are typically done because interaction creates distraction from the task at hand (reading, prayer, etc.) or because of cultural mores (bathing - in some cultures, but not others; bio-break functions, etc.).

Things done with selected others are typically things that require two or more people to do, but have some level of intimacy (private conversations, consultations, sexual activity, etc.).

‘Things done in public’ is self evident.

People have different expectations of privacy in each of these cases. When alone, the expectation is that no one is monitoring you. When engaged with selected others, the expectation is that no one is monitoring your group actions, and that the group (which of necessity monitors itself) will not share or distribute reports of those activities (i.e.: secrets will be kept). When in public one expects that one will be monitored or viewed in some fashion (people watching park bench sitters, Closed Circuit video cameras, etc.).

Breaking these expectations is what people view as a loss of privacy. Being monitored (using technology or not) when you believe you are alone, is viewed as an invasion of privacy, and a loss of privacy. Being monitored when you are in a self selected private group (Doctors or Lawyer’s office, driving in a car with a friend, ‘wiretapping’ a telephone conversation, etc.) is likewise viewed as a privacy invasion.

The “public” situation is a little more interesting. For many thousands of years, “public” has been viewed essentially as “semi-private”. Yes, you were out, and about, and could be recognized, but that actually provided very little information about either “who” you were, or “what” you were doing. In essence, you were in public, but you were semi-anonymous. That has changed in recent years. Pervasive video surveillance, GPS, RFID (Toll Tag) and biometric data systems (fingerprint and DNA databases, face recognition systems, etc.) mean that your every move can be tracked, and associated with you, the individual. Further, it doesn’t disappear. Your public life is very likely recorded and stored. This is an area that’s changing very, very rapidly.

People also “feel” anonymous, particularly “on-line”. There’s this idea that if “you can’t see me, and you can’t hear me, and you don’t know “Where I am” then I’m anonymous, and not identifiable. As most of tech types know, that’s just ‘wrong understanding’. I’ll look at “anonymity” in a future post.

People want Privacy, and they want Expression (’free speech’ in US parlance). I think it’s time that our legislatures made the effort to define the expectations of privacy and expression. What do you think?

Filed under: Anonymity, Identification, Privacy