Talk:Privacy

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  • Write sections on history of privacy (including privacy and technology), philosophy of privacy (including value of privacy and critiques of privacy), and maybe psychology of privacy
  • Internationalize privacy law section
  • research whether any non-human animal behavior is analogous to human privacy
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[edit] Revisions needed

In my opinion, the current Privacy article needs some major work; its an increasingly important subject and deserves an outstanding article that explains it a clear historical, legal, and philosophical framework. Below, I've tried to explain why I think change is needed and how I propose we go about it. Of course, I wouldn't want to reform the entire article without significant discussion and coopoeration so I'm posting my thoughts here. There's a huge amount of information in the article and in many respects, its quite good - please don't think I'm knocking anyone's work - the main problem is in organizing the existing material. I have neither the knowledge nor the time to implement all of these changes myself (at least in the near future) but I'll get to work on it sometime. Once I figure out how, I'll also nominate the article to the Article Improvement Drive to make the work easier.

[edit] Issues with the current article

  • US-centricity: This page is very biased towards the situation in the United States. The situation is quite different in most of the rest of the world, most notably in Europe where strong data protection laws are in place. The page does not adequately reflect this ... but unfortunately I don't personally know enough about it to consider myself qualified to make corrections!
  • lack of cohesiveness: The main problem that I see with the current article is a general lack of cohesiveness. The several sections reflect the piece-meal fashion in which they were assembled - several excellent pieces without a unifying framework. Part of this is also no doubt due to general confusion about the meaning of privacy in its various manifestations. Still, a better effort can be made.
  • overlapping categories: Many of the current categories overlap or otherwise aren't completely logical - for example, "privacy during an online job search" is a subset of "internet privacy"; "arguments for/against privacy" certainly has something to do with the trade-off b/w privacy and security; "genetic privacy" seems to be an aspect of "medical privacy"; protection from invasion by certain organizations (government or corporations) is not the same kind of division as protection of certain types of information (medical, political) or protection of certain means (internet) yet they are all in the "types of privacy" section.
  • non-encyclopedic content: The article contains several examples of points of view, opinions, and otherwise non-encyclopedic content. Lines such as "when we do online shopping or some other activities, we have to be wary...," though useful advice, don't really belong in an encyclopedia article. Perhaps such content could be included with a cite to a quote or some other authority.
  • missing information: Many important aspects of privacy are simply missing: the philosophical underpinnings, physical privacy of the home and body, financial privacy, etc.
  • few cites: This is pretty self-explanatory. To retain an objective tone, cites should be included as much as is possible/helpful.
  • length: Privacy is a broad and complicated topic. To retain readability, some of the larger sections should be splintered off into separate articles.

[edit] Possible improvements

Divide the existing content into different categories. I'd recommend the following scheme:

  • introduction describing what privacy is and its importance, generally;
  • types of privacy (physical, informational, decisional, etc.) - many of these probably deserve their own sub-topics.
  • areas of privacy (medical, financial, political, religious, etc.) - since most of these are merely different aspects of informational privacy, maybe they can go into an "informational privacy" article...
  • justification for privacy - should include philosophical justifications, many of the normative arguments in the current article, some of the topics suggested elsewhere in this discussion by other authors (dignity, etc).
  • legal protection of privacy (in the US but at least somewhat comparative) - should discuss constitutional, statutory, and common law bases.
  • history of privacy - probably can be meshed into the preceding categories but may deserve its own.
  • references
  • links - to groups protecting privacy, etc.

Please discuss or just completely dismiss...--Smintsaredelicious 13:17, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

I looked up "privacy" for one reason -- I wanted to know more about the history of privacy, only to find there was nothing about it. I endorse the above suggested improvements.69.6.162.160 23:36, 3 July 2006 (UTC)Brian Pearson

[edit] Does private behavior exist in non-human animals?

I am interested in finding out if there can be found analogues to the human desire for privacy in the behavior of other species, or if it is for the most part strictly a human manifestation. This question doesn't seem to be addressed in the current version of this article. Ground 23:13, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Dignity & Privacy

This article is very limited in scope, and "reasons for privacy" completely ignores the common basis of understanding e.g. in medical ethics that without privacy, dignity is severely impaired.

The same argument applies all cultures. 24.86.203.199 09:42, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Add a section about the psychology of privacy

I suggest adding a section explaining the psychological aspects of privacy, and why privacy is a fundamental human need. In summary:

  1. Knowledge is power. Knowledge about me means power upon me. Knowledge can be abused, the power through knowledge about me can be used to harm me. Loosing the secrecy of information about me puts me at the mercy of those who know my secrets. Such abuse can be: manipulating, blackmailing, aspersing.
  2. The need for privacy is thus ultimately part of the fundamental need for safety; safety with respect to minimising the power of others over oneself.
  3. This is why we hesitate to give private information to others without adequate benefits. Who would tell their salary, their medical problems or their political opinions to any stranger without an adequate benefit in return?
  4. We thus tend to give away personal data if we perceive the benefits of doing so justify the risks of doing so.
  5. We make this tradeoff instinctively and routinely all the time. We constantly make decisions about how much to disclose to whom about ourselves against what benefit and at what risk.
  6. The perceived risk of disclosing private information (and usually the real risk as well) is high when we know the other person (i.e. having interacted with that person for a while), when the other person has a good reputation or when we think the other person will take some damage when abusing our personal data (us taking revenge, her being prosecuted and punished, etc.). In the opposite case, the perceived risk is low.
  7. This perceived risk tends to diminish over time, if we have the feeling that the other person didn't abuse our private information. In the other case, the perceived risk diminishes drastically.
  8. Typical benefits of us disclosing our private information are getting a service or better service (I need to tell the butcher what I like or else he doesn't know what to give me), not annoying the other person who is requiring the information and who would do me harm if I didn't give her the information and compromising the other person by letting her know I trust her and thereby expressing my expectation of her not to abuse my trust and making her feel that revenge can be expected if ever whe should abuse my trust. Thus a method to tie another person's interests to mine.

Peter.keller (talk) 18:22, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merger proposal

As pointed out here, most of the the content in this article actually relates to Data privacy, leaving little left in this article about non data/information related privacy. It therefore makes sense to merge them.

Once the merging and overall revision / completion of this article is being carried out as suggested here, it may result in a rather long article, justifying splitting up the article.

Kellerpm (talk) 00:24, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] philosophy of privacy

this article would be much better if it covered the philosophy of privacy. a good resource is http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/privacy/. Calliopejen1 (talk) 19:53, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Other types of privacy

I have added new headings to discuss different "types of privacy" and "areas of privacy". I included sections for leading into existing articles on financial privacy, medical privacy, internet privacy, and data privacy. I also think that the sections currently titled "reasons for not maintaining privacy" and "privacy and security trade offs" should be reworked into sections discussing "reasons for privacy" and "reasons for relinquishing or denying privacy".

Personally I don't think data privacy should be merged into this article. The word "privacy" means many other things as well. I think the focus on data privacy may be a form of "systemic bias". Most wikipedians are info-tech workers and/or extensive internet users who are more concerned about someone reading our email or finding out where we have been surfing the web at work than with "real world" privacy concerns such as someone physically entering your home, searching your or your possessions, looking into your bedroom window, etc.--Afpre (talk) 12:11, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

I don't believe it should be merged into the article either. However, you must keep in mind that data privacy is not a phenomenon strictly limited to Internet-savvy tech-inclined people, and data is not necessarily digital data. For instance, if you are processed in the judicial system of an INTERPOL member country, your personal data could end up (quite literally) all over the world.
-Charlie.liban (talk) 23:45, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Comment on cleanup

I've been attempting some cleanup of the article. I moved a bunch of stuff here to subarticles, mostly, and then added section headers for conspicuous gaps in our coverage. I also checked through the history of this article for information that was once here and now isn't. Here are the three biggest removal diffs: [1], [2], [3]. I agree that this should have been removed, but the ideas might be worth researching further. Mangostar (talk) 07:42, 29 May 2008 (UTC)