For anyone learning how to navigate the world these days, the issue of privacy is likely causing a very particular sort of pounding headache.
On the one hand, nearly every website one visits wants to collect some form of personal data. On the other, we constantly hear horror stories about people who failed to note exactly which photos Facebook decided to share in their latest privacy review.
The government cuts the long-form census, purportedly to better protect Canadians’ privacy. Then before you know it, Vic Toews is defending proposals to monitor online activity without a warrant by saying critics “can either stand with us or with the child pornographers.”
For young people struggling to figure out where they fit in a world that — thanks to the Internet — seems to be getting increasingly public, it’s easy to feel like someone, somewhere, is crafting some badly mixed messages.
Part of the problem is that, when we think about privacy, we don’t typically see it as an end in itself. Instead, we see it as a tool, one that can be used to defend our interests — or to attack them.
Most Canadian privacy legislation looks at the issue from the perspective of defending our interests. Federal laws like the Privacy Act and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) have established guidelines on how government and private organizations can collect and store personal information. For instance, the law stipulates that individuals should be able to view and correct information that has been collected on them, that private organizations should receive consent before they collect any information and that, in most circumstances, the government should inform individuals that information is being collected.
These safeguards protect privacy — but they also serve to protect individuals from the specific harms that arise when governments or organizations abuse their power to collect and store information. There’s no need to cite Orwell when looking for instances where things might go wrong; a simple misplaced file with a SIN number and some personal information could be enough to steal an identity.
When we talk about privacy, then, it’s easy to conceive of it as something to be treasured. But there is a narrative on privacy that lies below the surface. In that narrative, the issue of privacy is mostly noticeable by its absence — after all, who wants to raise the issue of something as patently frivolous as privacy when security is at stake?
That question is how privacy becomes framed as a tool to attack our interests. Who would be callous enough to suggest we ought to prioritize privacy in airport security checks, if by abandoning it we can prevent terrorist attacks? Isn’t it irresponsible to consider issues of privacy when searching students’ backpacks and lockers could prevent the next Columbine or Newtown? And as Dean Del Mastro suggested on his Facebook page, why should we protect the privacy of cyberbullies and Internet trolls when we could force them to abandon their anonymity?
These issues often seem easy to separate: surely, government storage of information collected to allocate student loans is an entirely different animal from allowing the government to monitor online activity to seek out child molesters and terrorists.
And yet, if we can’t trust the government to safely store the personal information of 583,000 individuals who just wanted financial support for their education, why should we trust that the information government collects for other purposes will remain secure?
We need to have a conversation about when and where we expect our privacy to be protected. Our world is changing: while it was once safe to assume that what we did in the confines of our own homes would stay there, the digital breadcrumbs we leave behind with each social networking post or Internet search mean that’s no longer the case. In the past, one might have expected a certain amount of anonymity in a crowd, but as CCTV begins to cover more of our urban spaces, how much should our expectations change?
It’s very possible that some incursions into our previously private domains will make us better off. BC Transit, for instance, has introduced CCTV and audio recording into many of its buses. While not all passengers will be thrilled, the victims of assault on public transit may be reassured if this surveillance makes it easier to punish abuse.
But just because we can record information in new and exciting ways doesn’t mean we should. The rhetoric of security — of saving lives, fighting crime and letting us sleep soundly at night — is compelling. It’s compelling because it feeds on our fears, and those fears are not always well-founded. Do full-body scans at airports really make us safer? Or do they just make us feel safer?
That’s the crux of the issue: the very invasions of privacy that are justified to us on security grounds may leave us more vulnerable than the crimes they’re supposed to prevent, as we’ve seen again and again when governments lose track of the data we trusted them to protect.
We shouldn’t be teaching our young people to give their private information to government — or anyone else — without question. We should teach them instead to ask who wants to know, what they need to know it for, how the information will be stored and how it might be used if it ends up in the wrong hands.
Let’s refocus our energy on the proven risk: the private data that keeps getting lost. And in the meantime, let’s consider exactly where the new boundaries of privacy should lie, and what we ought to do to protect them.
Devon Black is studying law at the University of Victoria. In addition to writing for iPolitics, Devon has worked for the Canadian International Development Agency, Leadership Africa USA and RamRais & Partners.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.