Environment Questions regarding the Future of Privacy

<< back to 'Questions Regarding the Future of Privacy in 2015'

Questions

1. How does money influence privacy? (Patrick)
   

   Money in itself can not influence privacy except for on superficial levels, such as being able to buy a large secure house in a secluded area to maintain privacy. However, financial issues do very much affect privacy, Financial privacy, as defined by Richard W. Rahn, is “about the ability, and what many consider the right, to keep confidential the facts concerning one’s income, expenditures, investments, and wealth.” The facts mentioned are kept for reasons of taxes, fraud prevention, crime control, and more recently terrorist watch. These are all valid reasons, but it also means that every transaction done is monitored and stored. This is surely an invasion of privacy and against the definition of financial privacy given above.

2. What factors are increasing or decreasing privacy?
New company rules, government laws can increase as well as decrease person’s privacy. There are even more clearly factors, like popularity, work in political environment, rules in medical area, not save internet connection, etc. usually decrease your privacy. But money (as well as law) can increase privacy. You are able to “buy” protection for privacy: for example to build bigger wall around the house, to buy better security system at home, for computer or other personal data, to buy better lockers to prevent from break-ins.
3. How many people are there on the world? (Divided by continents age and race)
Current population: 6,579,691,627. [5]
4. How does population diversity affects privacy? (Robert)
The total amount of population on this world is: 6,579,691,627. This divided on different countries as stated below. If we compare this with the following picture: We can not say that there is a direct link between the amount of people and the density. As culture influences privacy the diversity of people does affect privacy in such a way that people are influencing each other. While influencing them the ideas of privacy might change for good or bad. If the majority of the population would be the same there would be one idea about privacy, right and wrong, crime, etc. This is not the case so we could state that the diversity of people does matter. Also two groups with a different perspective of privacy or religion could get into a “fight” together because of their ideas.
5. Does culture affect privacy? (Robert)
Culture does not affect privacy directly but more indirect. Culture can be seen as a habit, people are used to certain things which seem completely logic to them. Within the different cultures around the world are different understandings of privacy. Although people have different understandings it stays privacy. In this way culture does affect privacy. We can also state it the other way around. Privacy can make culture. Particularly this is done within an organization which stated their corporate culture according to their perspectives of privacy.
6. Reasons for privacy? (Patrick)
   

   Seen from an anonymity point of view, privacy can be desired because people are prone to subjective opinions. An entry on an internet blog shows a hypothetical example of a registered sex-offender wanting to discuss on the internet the reasons and effects of his actions for self-help reasons. The internet is a powerful tool for this, but in fear of people's subjective opinions and biases leading to hateful acts of violence, the sex-offender has good reason to want to remain anonymous. People are unclear in why they want privacy, it often seems that sometimes the same information that is given away openly and with full support for one reason, is kept safely closed to others for another reason. Companies may keep corporate results a secret, or may want to, but investors want to know everything about a company. This makes privacy regulation hard. So people want privacy to benefit them in some way, or to prevent the publication of information from hurting them. As stated in another research question on this page, power is also a strong driver to want to intrude on another's privacy. For this reason, inversely, people want privacy because they do not want their neighbors to have that 'power' of knowing something about them which they are not intended to know. People want privacy to have the choice of what they want other people to know about them. If private information is publicized openly somehow, it is out of the person's hand to control that aspect of their life.

7. What are the levels of privacy?
It is hard to define the levels of privacy, because it depends on personality, information and current situation. For example, it depends on the person if he is willing to share personal data like phone number or address, because it depends on situation how this information will be used. But in general: there should be minimum privacy (to loose more privacy can damage person’s wellbeing), maximum privacy (don’t want to share privacy in any conditions) and some in-between with dependencies.
8. What are the gains of privacy?
The basic gain of privacy is security, or in other words “the right to be left alone”. When nobody knows your private information, you feel more save: it allows you to act more freely, dependent on your own and not on others.
9. Why is person x so interested in persons y's privacy? (Robert)
   

   POWER. From centuries on people want to control other people. The things people or most likely companies want to control is the behavior of people. Companies can have tremendous advantages if they know what the shopping behavior is of people. Or even less difficult they can sent personal mailings although you are totally not interested in the offers. This phenomena we know as spam but at this point I am referring to analogue spam. Even companies, although ignored, are sometimes willing to pay a lot of money for this data. There is a huge black market for these kind of data. Therefore the amount of cyber crime is rapidly increasing. The internet is an easy way to gain information because it is not totally secure although a lot of are thinking it is. But this goes further than mailings. Governments are nowadays, after 9-11, very interested in the privacy data of certain persons. This has more to do with protecting others than rather personal interest. If we go back to the power to control it may seem strange but for a certain group of people in our societies it is rather interesting to know private/personal information in order to be able to manipulate people. Which can be for their benefits.

10. What parties are involved in influencing privacy? (Patrick)
11. Can corps. Influence privacy?
12. What is done with privacy info? (Patrick)
13. Effect of privacy on socialization?
14. How big is the role that privacy is playing in defining living conditions? (housing, location etc)
The role isn’t big. While living in a block house, person has less privacy, but it depends on your and your neighbors’ personality: it depends on neighbors how curious they are, but it depends on you and how disturbed you feel like by that. Similar situation is with the role of location: in some countries to share much more personal details is “in the culture”. For example: it is popular belief that in south countries people talk more about themselves then in north ones. So people from south countries are willing to share more details, but they are less disturbed with intervention in personal lives. Of course it is not so strict and it depends more on character. But it depends on information itself. If it is related with better wellbeing (your and your family money, health, etc.) the role of living conditions is irrelative.
15. Reasoning for giving up privacy for entertainment? (Big Brother etc)
The basic is of course to gain some kind of benefits. What to gain it depends on person and on entertainment. Persons, who participate in Music Reality Shows, usually want to gain quick/ first popularity by showing their voice capabilities, songs, etc. The reason is to win main prize is also important. In some cases, the prize is not the main one, but the adventure itself, or new friends, lovers, contacts. The motivation for participating in other skills (dancing, journalism…) reality shows are the same. The other possible reason is to gain attention, but this depends more on personality. The dependency on character is clear in writing web-diaries or in chat-rooms (like feel lonely).

References

[1]Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. Protecting Financial Privacy. March 2006, http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs24-finpriv.htm
[2]Rahn, Richard W. "The Future of Money and Financial Privacy". Chapter 6 from "The Future of Financial Privacy", October 2005, Competitive Enterprise Institute
Available online: http://www.cei.org/gencon/026,02262.cfm
[3]Epstein, Richard A. How Much Privacy Do We Really Want?. 2002. Hoover Digest, No. 2, Hoover Institution. http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3437411.html
[4]Parsons, Bob. April 3, 2005 on a “Why privacy makes the internet safer. How anonymity hides the bad guys” blog. http://www.bobparsons.com/WhyprivacymakestheInternetsaferHowanonymityhidesthebadguys.html
[5]U.S. Census Bureau, Word Population Information. http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/world.html