Week 5: Seeking privacy in public zones?

In class this week we were asked to summarise our personal definition of the notion of privacy. I came up with the following: Rights to one's own ownership of intimate and specific detail they have requested remain discrete from many/others, whether be visual, written/documented and/or recorded details. I then listed my specific restrictions i.e. home address, phone contact. Also boundaries i.e.  political views, religious views and children/family details. 

Upon entering discussion in class, I came to a sad conclusion: that society is completely and willingly abusing their own privacy whilst simultaneously openly complaining about how their privacy is still at risk. Take for instance the worlds global viewing deck: Facebook. It request upon signing up specific details about your life, your work, your home, your beliefs etc. This is NOT a mandatory request, these are merely OPTIONAL requests. You would not post a list of details and stick them up on city centre notice board, photo included, and expect your privacy to be respected now would you? No, and then again, no one asked you to do this, so why place your life in a position of such vulnerability and then complain to others that somebody took your address and started posting it spam mail, or worse.

On a lighter note, after reading a rather lengthy Harvard Law excerpt, titled 'The Right to Privacy' (Warrenand Brandeis, 1890) I came to wish that people still cherished writing that way, still accepted that law could be so beautifully expressed. Although published over 100 dazzling years ago, one can't help but sense the modernity of the concept, the relativity that it has to society today. The basic concept of rights in land and property, privacy and value is still upheld in this decade. What has changed is the creation of NEW reasons to question privacy, such as those discussed in the Online Diaries article (de Laat, 2008). People are open books, nothing is left for the imagination. If information is not of the educational or informative type then my view stands for the negative. I can respect the need for reassurance, the need for intimacy and often empathy, but i cannot respect people once long ago having to fight for their rights to privacy and have - decades on - bloggers and social networkers abuse these unnecessarily for sake of attention.

Whether or not it's because humans are often unimpressed by themselves some of the time should not have to be made up for by becoming something else. They can develop something new, and perhaps keep it to themselves in the beginning.