Nothing to hide: What happened to privacy?

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What happened to privacy?

Privacy, like its opposite, Kim Kardashian, is often in the news these days, and not usually for the best reasons.

It was revealed just last week, for example, that half the adult population of the US has been captured on police facial recognition databases, whether they've committed a crime or not.

Earlier in the month, an Italian journalist gratuitously "outed" the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante, author of the globally bestselling Neapolitan novels, a woman who famously treasured her privacy and had previously spoken of how anonymity gives her the space and freedom to create.

Here in Australia, there's the rolling fiasco of the 2016 census, sparked by the Australian Bureau of Statistics' decision to retain names and addresses for up to four years.

Tracking, hacking, stalking, spying: everywhere you look these days, privacy is under siege.

Governments and giant corporations hoover up every breadcrumb of metadata we drop online, and the more we live online, the bigger the trail.

Still, you have to smile — if only because that person with the odd-looking sunglasses is recording a 10-second video of you that she's about to upload to Snapchat.

As Scott McNealy, the founder and CEO of Sun Microsystems suggested back in 1999: "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."

Many people apparently are over it, considering an attachment to privacy somewhere on the spectrum between quaint and Jurassic.

Mark Zuckerberg, who has done more than most to adjust the world's default privacy settings to "share", professes to be one. He has dismissed privacy as little more than an "outdated social norm".

He has a point. These days, exhibitionism and narcissism are not seen as pathologies so much as exercises in personal brand-building. Who cares about metadata collection or even CCTV cameras? Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, right?

I'll let Edward Snowden answer that one: "Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."

But what is privacy? Is it really just a "social norm", outdated or not? The word privacy derives from the Latin privatus, which indicates a separation between the communal (household) and public spheres.

Later, it came to signify the separation of personal (individual) and public. My dictionary defines it as "a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people", or "the state of being free from public attention".

It is also a right — "the right to be let alone", as an influential article published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890 put it. It is a human right.

Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states: "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation."

It says that everyone has "the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks".

There is all the difference between being out and being outed.

That principle is behind the recent ruling of a Belfast court that a 14-year-old girl can sue Facebook for allowing the repeated publication of naked images of her on a "shame", or revenge porn page against the objections of her and her parents — a case that could set a global precedent.

It is one reason why the Australian government's offshore detention system, which is so disdainful of detainees' privacy that female asylum seekers can be forced to shower with only a curtain between them and a potentially predatory male guard, has earned the forceful condemnation of such organisations as Amnesty International and the UN.

A loss of privacy is almost always a sign of an absence of both rights and power. I interviewed the journalist and Wiradjuri man Stan Grant for my Earshot program, Nothing to hide.

Nothing to hide

Listen to Linda Jaivin's three-part series on privacy and its discontents. Listen to Linda Jaivin's three-part series on privacy and its discontents.

Grant described in eloquent detail the distressing and demoralising invasions of privacy that he and his community regularly experienced at the hands of welfare officers, who would enter his home to check what was in the cupboards, and police, who upturned his (white) grandmother's pram on suspicion that she was supplying alcohol to Aboriginal neighbours, and who dragged his grandfather from his bed on suspicion that he'd been drinking.

Mark Zuckerberg, I'm guessing, has never been forced to consider the subject of privacy in such stark terms. Still, he protects his own rather well, reportedly paying $US30 million to insulate his family from public view, buying the four houses adjacent to his new home in Palo Alto.

Money can't buy you love, but it can give you a good stab at privacy. The aptly named Hidden Hills, a gated community north of Malibu, in LA, is the wealthiest community in the US.

It is also possibly the most private: it's not even on Google Street View. The post-Brangelina Angelina recently moved there. Kim Kardashian is one of her neighbours — even the exhibitionists' exhibitionist knows something of the importance of privacy.

Eric Schmidt, the founder of Google, whose cars have definitely been down my street, declared in 2009 that "if you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place".

Privacy's loss, after all, has been Google's gain. But four years later his attitude was less cavalier: "You have to fight for your privacy, or you will lose it," he told a reporter. "Whenever there's a conflict, the logic of security will trump the right to privacy."

The "logic of security", combined with advances in technology, presents an unprecedented challenge to privacy here in Australia and around the world. The stakes are high. But are our laws adequate to protect our rights?

I spoke to Emily Meller, a young law graduate with a strong interest in privacy. She brought up how in the 1930s, Holland collected data on its citizens in order to provide better social services.

Then the Nazis invaded, and the data allowed them to easily identify the country's Jews: over 70 per cent of Dutch Jews were deported, compared with about 25 per cent of French Jews.

"That's really what we are talking about," says Meller, "the architecture of our privacy laws, it's not for the right now, it's for the future."

In the best case scenario, all the data collected is able to make us more secure from terrorism or crime, and none will fall into the wrong hands.

But privacy expert Suelette Dreyfus notes that the empirical evidence that it keeps us safe is far from convincing.

Surveillance itself poses severe threats to whistleblowers and journalists who need to be able to protect their sources. It threatens, in other words, the very functioning of the democracy we are trying to protect.

"Their desire is sincere to protect us, but there's also a sort of tipping point where you collect all this data and you've turned into the surveillance state, and at some point you say, well, look, North Korea is probably a very safe place, but it's not necessarily the country most Australians would sign up for as a model for government," says Dreyfus.

Indeed. There's also the question of what happens to us as individuals — our personalities, our psyches, our ability to think freely and creatively — when we are deprived of privacy or give too much of it away.

In her review of Dave Eggers' novel The Circle, Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood asks: "What happens to us if we must be 'on' all the time? Then we're in the 24-hour glare of the supervised prison. To live entirely in public is a form of solitary confinement."

I have visited one of the world's original "supervised prisons" — the Separate Prison at Port Arthur in Tasmania. The idea behind the supervised prison, or Panopticon, was that if inmates thought they were being watched, they would reform themselves and become better people. In reality, at Port Arthur as elsewhere, it more often drove them to madness.

My guide at Port Arthur, Colin Knight, has been taking people through the Separate Prison, studying its history and contemplating its lessons for two decades. I asked him for his take on privacy.

Privacy, he answered, is "something that is part of our freedom as a human being. Whether I've got nothing to hide or whether I have got something to hide is my business."

Topics: human, rights, law-crime-and-justice, defence-and-national-security, australia

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