Why Privacy Matters

Rory Litwin at the excellent Library Juice blog suggests three things we can do to remind ourselves why privacy matters:

1. Recall specific occasions in your life when you realized you needed to make some information about yourself more private, or when you realized that your power to control your own life was diminished by your lack of privacy.
2. Imagine how life would be different if personal information about you and people you know were radically more available to businesses, government, and strangers, because of fear-based policies combined with a more technologically-mediated life.
3. Think about the way that fear leads not only to more surveillance but to an expansion of what is considered suspicious, and how this problem answers the common objection, “If you aren’t going anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.”

Good things to keep in mind when some sexy new technology seems to encroach on privacy…