From: Thomas Lee <tyl2102@columbia.edu>
  To  : <CPC@emoglen.law.columbia.edu>
  Date: Fri, 12 May 2006 12:05:43 -0400

[CPC] Paper Two: Privacy Is Not a Lifestyle Choice

You hear it all the time.  We shouldn’t have expectations of privacy
given the state of technology and society.  Any entitlement to it is
long gone.  Yet, this instinctively feels wrong.  Living in a city
of millions should provide vast amounts of anonymity.  Shopping
online should not be an automatic surrendering of the details of
our lives.  Even a brief look at the situation makes it clear that
privacy still holds meaning.

People moved from their small towns and villages to urban centers so
that they could regain some sense of anonymity.  Instead of have an
entire community gossiping about his personal life, one could go to
the city and become lost in the swell of people, each caught up in
his own life and too busy to become fixated on yours.  One might
argue that as certain cities have become relatively stabilized in
terms of population growth that this no longer holds as true.  The
city becomes more like a collection of small villages separated by
somewhat arbitrary and intangible borders.  The neighborhood is the
new town.

Neighborly gossip is far from dead.  The local newsstand knows what
brand of cigarettes you smoke and whether you read a newspaper or
tabloid.  When you stop at the corner deli, they start making your
favorite sandwich without you saying a word.  However, there is a
key difference between the city neighborhood and the intimate
village.  In the city you can decide to travel to different areas
for your daily cup of coffee, and it might not even be an
inconvenience.  People do it all the time out of differences in
taste or price.  This is something that just isn’t practical when
living in a village.  If you were to travel to a different village,
the distance alone might make the task more trouble than it’s worth.
 And even if you were willing to go through with the trouble, you
would be instantly recognized as an outsider.  Traveling to a
different city neighborhood would hardly cause a stir.  With your
status as a stranger nothing new, your anonymity would be
preserved, at least until you became a permanent fixture in your
new haunts.

The city also provides a feeling that no small town ever could: the
comfort of knowing that at any given moment there are still
millions surrounding you who do not know who you are.  While the
city’s borders themselves may seem open and in some cases not a
barrier to outside communities at all, there is a sense of those
inside being removed from those outside.  This distinct partition
helps to create a sense of community—one that a person can get lost
in.

If where you live holds certain expectations of privacy, the way you
live should still do so as well.  Using a cell phone or a credit
card entails a loss of privacy.  This surely was not an arrangement
most of us willingly or knowingly entered into.  Some may say that
with the way people use cell phones in public, especially on their
Bluetooth headsets, one can’t expect full privacy anymore. 
Parading your conversation in front of strangers is asking for them
to be thrust into your private affairs.  You can learn about a
person’s spousal problems in the time it takes for a crosstown bus
ride, all you need is decent hearing and a seat next to a loud and
obnoxious individual.  But this does not mean the vocal phone user
has no expectations of privacy; it is a fine line between
unintentionally overhearing and eavesdropping, which still violates
a well established social norm.

More flagrant a violation is the availability of calling lists. 
Such a list can contain a month’s or more worth of called numbers. 
It divulges calling habits, such as what time and day of the week
someone calls his mother.  It tells the viewer who the caller dials
five times a day for important business negotiations.  If we are
angered when a nosy significant other peaks at our phone’s dialed
number list, the violation here is at least tenfold.  Credit card
and online transactions also make a strong case for privacy.

The privacy policy: a website will assure you to no end that it
never intends to sell your precious information to third parties
and will only contact you in specific circumstances.  It seems safe
and even more importantly, honest.  Skeptics will say that anyone
who believes these is being intentionally naïve.  Such consumers
are merely looking for a way to justify wanting to enjoy the
conveniences of online shopping without the costs involved.  It is
not reasonable to expect a company to guard your information.  It
is not reasonable to expect that you will stay anonymous from the
marketers and spam.  But there is still something to be said for
misrepresentation and false reliance on such lies.  And the
government, while not exactly a proponent of privacy these days,
agrees on this point.

It is illegal in many instances for a company to sell your data,
especially if a privacy policy is in place.  There are a multitude
of such offenses being reported in the news.  This does not mean
that privacy policies are no longer legitimate: merely that the
number of offenders still must be drastically reduced.  It may thus
be good common sense to take precautions, only doing business with
the most reputable of websites, but it surely is not required for
you to expect that your information will be illegally sold either.

If there are still strong reasons to believe that urban life
provides a shield from outsiders, as there clearly are, perhaps
privacy is not too much to ask.  When we grow outraged at
unauthorized tracking of our lives, we are not simply out of tune
with the times.  Technology may have made data mining so easy that
it comes to be almost commonplace and a given, but this still does
not make it something we must accept.

Word Count: 992

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