Media Ethics Issues and Cases Chapter 5

Privacy: Looking for Solitude in the Global Village

I've been thinking a lot about public obligations: My friend Becca and I were actually talking about it last night (while in the midst of an existential crisis) and we parted ways once we realized that we couldn't find answers to the questions

• "Who has the right to know private things about me?" 
• "What is a difference between a lie of omission and a private matter?"
• "What gives certain people precedence over others when it comes to personal information?
• "Am I under any sort of public/social obligation to expose my personal life to others?

The first step to recovery is accepting you have a problem...right? Well, after the existential crisis was admitted I searched for solutions. It didn't take long for me to make it to COMM 215 and realize I hadn't read or written a blog for today's class (sorry). The topic was privacy and immediate light was shed on the internal struggles I had been facing.

The difference between 'Privacy' and 'Secrecy' shocked me, and the sentence "secrecy is neither morally good nor bad" quelled my fears but left me without answers. But when the difference between the right and the need to know became apparent, I began to see that not everyone (the public) has the right to know my personal matters. It is simply a matter of context whether I share my private matters and context is also key in deciding the difference between a lie of omission and a personal secrecy. I am only under a social obligation when context becomes a factor that presses the situation and calls the private individual to calculate their motives for privacy. I have come to terms with the fact that my life is very much linked to the concept of the circles of intimacy, and up until reading this chapter I thought that was a negative thing.

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Privacy in the media is a whole different ballpark. I am a complete poetry dork, I run a poetry blog called Human Words that occasionally features my own poetry. The vulnerability involved in exposing ones feelings to the world wide web is one thing, but having a floor-mate read over your shoulder as you post a poem is another. It scared me to realize I was more uncomfortable with the latter situation. This fear and secrecy led me to pull the computer screen away saying "hey, this is not your business", he only replied "it's not my business but you are posting it for the world to see?" 

Privacy has been redefined alongside human communication and technology. It is our job to continue to fine tune the meanings of privacy and solitude, especially in an age where our innermost feelings are tweeted in a second and where certain individuals feel comfortable posting pictures of their legs in the bathtub on Instagram.

Other issues exist when it comes to privacy on the internet as well. The second bullet point in the "four potential harms when privacy is invaded" section really stuck out to me. "informational inequality, such as governments and corporations amassing large amounts of data about individuals without their consent" this quote made me think of two things: Facebook and Google. The takeover and buy-out of Instagram and Whatsapp by Facebook and the massive aggregation of user's data by Google has left its users vulnerable. Yes, contracts and terms and agreements are usually involved, but that does not make this informational inequality okay. We are exposed to multiple privacy concerns when we log on to just one of our social media accounts, and we are a wrapped up in a culture where it is a social obligation to have those accounts.