As You Like It: Your Own Business

The other night at a library trustees meeting, our discussion turned to the issue of privacy. Someone mentioned that a popular blogger in Stoughton had published the salaries of all the town employees and so many of the teachers in town were irate. Betty answered that salaries were a matter of public record so we really couldn’t fault the blogger. While I understand that town salaries are public, it’s still disconcerting to see your salary published on a web site or newspaper. People usually don’t bother to go to the library to look up someone’s information, but we all read something that is in front of us.

That discussion led to the fact that starting in May, if you want to manage your library account online, you can no longer use OCLN as your pin. Now you have to come up with your own. We groaned at the thought of coming up with yet another password to add to our constantly growing collection, but Betty said that she had had her own pin for a while.

“Why?” I asked her, wondering why she would care who saw the books she was reading. But then I remembered the privacy issues surrounding the Homeland Security Act that had government agents demanding to see our reading lists on the assumption that if we read about bombings we were automatically terrorists. Excuse the pun, but no one wants their lives to be a completely open book.

The issue of our right to privacy surfaced interestingly this year when an Italian court ruled that Google had violated Italian privacy law by allowing users to post a video on one of its services. New York Times reporter Adam Liptak wrote on February 26 that:

The ruling was a nice discussion starter about how much responsibility to place on services like Google for offensive content that they passively distribute.

But in a deeper sense it called attention to the profound European commitment to privacy, one that threatens the American conception of free expression.

“Americans to this day don’t fully appreciate how Europeans regard privacy,” said Jane Kirtley, who teaches media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota. “The reality is that they consider privacy a fundamental human right.”

Americans and Europeans view privacy very differently. Americans think of it in terms of protection against government interference in their lives and especially their homes. Europeans focus on protecting people from having their lives exposed to public view, especially in the media. In America, free expression is codified in the First Amendment. In Europe, privacy comes first. Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights states: “Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.”

The historical reasons for this divergence are fascinating. According to Fred H. Cate, a law professor at Indiana University:

The privacy protections we see reflected in modern European law are a response to the Nazi Gestapo and the East German Stasi, totalitarian regimes that used informers, surveillance and blackmail to maintain their power, creating a web of anxiety and betrayal that permeated those societies. We haven’t really lived through that in the United States.

Lee Levine, a Washington lawyer who has taught media law in America and France adds:

American experience has been entirely different. So much of the revolution that created our legal system was a reaction to excesses of government in areas of press and speech.

The more I think about the issue the more I agree with Judge Bostjan M. Zupancic of Slovenia’s conclusion:

I believe that the courts have to some extent and under American influence made a fetish of the freedom of the press. It is time that the pendulum swung back to a different kind of balance between what is private and secluded and what is public and unshielded.

I would be the last person to lambaste the First Amendment, but would a little privacy be such a bad thing in this increasingly naked society of ours? Last month I noticed signs in my gym requesting that people not use cell phones in the locker room. It took me a while to realize that it wasn’t to grant us some peace and quiet but to protect against people using their cell phones as cameras.

I don’t need to know each last detail about every political scandal. I’m not happy that anyone can Google me and find out more about my life than I care to remember. I’m tired of listening in to the world’s cell phone conversations and don’t want to know which public camera is filming me crossing the street.

Last month Mariel taught my students about plate tectonics and volcanoes. Two of my students are Haitian, so the class was especially interesting for them. Suddenly Mariel had a brainstorm. She downloaded GoogleEarth and found their houses in Haiti. They couldn’t believe it. Later on at home she showed me our house on the site. It was incredibly unsettling to see our house complete with Steve’s car parked outside. Google’s StreetView service, which provides ground-level panoramas gathered by cars with cameras on them, was just too close for comfort. I find it interesting that the program has generated legal challenges in Switzerland and Germany. I wouldn’t mind a legal challenge here in the U.S. as well. I’m all for the First Amendment, but I’d like my business to remain my own.

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Posted by Joan Florek Schottenfeld on May 6 2010. Filed under As You Like It, Opinion. Both comments and pings are currently closed.