Author Jeffrey Rosen's Substantive Viewpoint of Privacy

When I saw an excerpt of this news item on my newsfeeder I assumed it would be another irrational diatribe. My bad. Turns out this is the best, most rational and most specific overview of real privacy issues that I've read. You might want to read it as well. It's from a presentation made by Jeffrey Rosen at the annual Security Industry Association Technology Management Conference in New York City.

Among other things, he says:

"I urge you to resist the simplistic view, 'If I've got nothing to hide, I've got nothing to fear," he said. "That doesn't coincide with intuition."

Rosen, a law professor and legal affairs editor for The New Republic, used several examples in which law-abiding citizens could be embarrassed by too much transparency. He relayed a newspaper story about young people who were shocked to find out that prospective employers looked up their pages on MySpace and took a dim view of job candidates with unusual taste in music, pictures of themselves drinking with friends and photographs of them posing in bikinis.
The reason they were surprised is that people present different faces in different situations.
"It's not because I'm a hypocrite," he said. "It's because I'm human."

See, I get that. That's an example I can understand. So many others simply say the sky is falling and then run for cover from... who knows what.