Is Privacy Possible?

While the Constitution does not mention privacy as such, many people would like to believe that it is included in "the pursuit of happiness" in our Declaration of Independence, while others might argue that privacy is essential to liberty. You cannot promise liberty without implicitly promising privacy. Property that is privately owned is protected by law, and the Constitution, as amended, prohibits "unlawful searches and seizures." But the most abstract and insecure form of privacy is "personal privacy" --- essentially, the ownership of one's life story (everything that one does) as a unique possession that only he/she can freely share with others. 

Ever since the attack on New York's World Trade Center, September 11, 2001, both the Federal government and state and local governments have moved in significant ways to monitor people's activities both foreign and national. So now we have a young man, Edward Snowden, who prides himself as being a "whistleblower" by revealing details of current Federal surveillance practices. Republicans, under whom most of these measures began, are being smugly quiet, while they let Democrats try to defend NSA practices and take the heat. 

I do not know enough about any of this to make an interesting or important judgement of my own. What I do know is that every time anything like the Boston Marathon bombing happens, the people want to know right away why government agencies failed to see this coming and weren't there to prevent it. There are two sides to this coin and people need to be honest about whether they are willing to sacrifice some privacy for the security they want. But I think the present discussion highlights an even more important fact and that is that privacy may be impossible in today's world anyway. 

First of all, we give away portions of our privacy every time we enroll in any new program --- shopping, banking, credit, media, you name it.  All that material is put out there in digital files that can be accessed by all kinds of people whom we do not know and have no desire to know. Then, of course, when we use our credit cards or our Vons shopping cards, everywhere we go and everything we purchase is part of the great digital record. Vons knows I have both a cat and a dog and which foods I prefer. Hence, I get promotional offers aimed at my pets. If I am traveling, my credit card companies know where I am and what I am doing. More promotional offers. Then, of course, when I use any digital medium --- my cell phone, my iPad, my computer --- I am leaving a huge trail of data behind me at all levels of our very complex communication systems. Usually for very good reasons, that data is not erased for some time but lives in various backup systems. Of course, if I walk out my door, there is usually some surveillance camera on some commercial building that records my passage and holds it in a file for some period of time.

The issue here is not so much whether all of this "sharing" of my personal privacy is acceptable but it is who looks at this data and why. In effect is it such a big deal that NSA collects huge amounts of this data on everyone. The deal breaker is how they choose to look at it and why. As a breach of privacy is the NSA scanning my phone texts any worse than Google learning how to aim specific commercial messages at me by monitoring what I search for day-in-day-out. 

In our age, a person can secure his/her privacy only at great expense and with a whole lot of imagination. Know where surveillance cameras are located and avoid them. Do not use a personally registered cell phone, only cheep one-time units you can throw away. Arrange to hide the identity of your computing devices somehow. Don't use shopping or bank cards. Go cash only. Get out of Facebook or whatever. It's a very different style of life! What this means is that, in the present style, we have all accepted huge losses in personal privacy as part of the cost.