The world heard from years from a variety of (mostly) Silicon Valley tech executives that privacy was ‘dead’, didn’t matter, or that ‘really people don’t care’. Setting aside the fact that people who yell the loudest about privacy ‘being dead’ are the same who profit from the death by the billions, privacy does in fact serve four well-established functions in society.
- It enables personal autonomy, the ability of an individual to control when information is released to the public.
- It allows for individuals to deviate from social or institutional norms.
- Privacy allows for self-evaluation.
- Privacy encourages communication by allowing for limited and protected circumstances (Bland, 1968).
It can refer to features in physical architecture, such as a ‘privacy fence’ (Abu-Gazzeh, 1995; Booher & Burdick, 2005; Mustafa, 2010; Witte, 2003). It can represent a set of engineering requirements for an information management system, such as ‘privacy requirements’ (Anton, Earp, & Young, 2009; He, Antón, & others, 2003; Kavakli, Kalloniatis, Loucopoulos, & Gritzalis, 2006; Omoronyia, Cavallaro, Salehie, Pasquale, & Nuseibeh, 2013). It has been trademarked as a marketing feature, such as ‘privacy by design’ (Cavoukian, 2009, 2012; Cavoukian & others, 2009; Duncan, 2007; Felten, 2012).
Frankly, the existence of an ever growing plethora of privacy legislation across the world further suggests an interest in privacy (DeCew, 1997).