AFFIRMATIVE PRIVACY — GENERAL 13

DEFENDERS OF INFORMATION TRANSPARENCY MISANALYZE OUR SOCIETY

THE DEFENDERS OF INFORMATION TRANSPARENCY IGNORE THAT WE LIVE A LIFE OF DIFFERING SOCIAL ROLES

Jeffrey Rosen, associate professor at the George Washington University Law School, The New York Times April 30, 2000, SECTION: Section 6; Page 46; TITLE: The Eroded Self // acs-EE2001

Moreover, defenders of transparency have adopted a unified vision of human personality, which views social masks as a way of misrepresenting the true self. But as the sociologist Erving Goffman argued in the 1960's, this take on personality is simplistic and misleading. Instead of behaving in a way that is consistent with a single character, people reveal different parts of themselves in different contexts. I may -- and do -- wear different social masks when interacting with my students, my editors, my colleagues and my dry cleaner. Far from being inauthentic, each of these masks helps me try to behave in a manner that is appropriate to the different roles demanded by these different social settings. If these masks were to be violently torn away, what would be exposed is not my true self but the spectacle of a wounded and defenseless man.

PRIVACY IS IMPORTANT FOR IDENTITY -- PRIVACY ALLOWS US NOT TO BE MISJUDGED OR MISINTERPRETED BY INFORMATION TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT

Jeffrey Rosen, associate professor at the George Washington University Law School, The New York Times April 30, 2000, SECTION: Section 6; Page 46; TITLE: The Eroded Self // acs-EE2001

Privacy protects us from being misdefined and judged out of context. This protection is especially important in a world of short attention spans, a world in which information can easily be confused with knowledge. When intimate personal information circulates among a small group of people who know you well, its significance can be weighed against other aspects of your personality and character. (Monica Lewinsky didn't mind that her friends knew she had given the president a copy of Nicholson Baker's "Vox" because her friends knew that she was much more than a person who would read a book about phone sex.) But when your browsing habits -- or e-mail messages -- are exposed to strangers, you may be reduced, in their eyes, to nothing more than the most salacious book you once read or the most vulgar joke you once told. And even if your Internet browsing isn't in any way embarrassing, you run the risk of being stereotyped as the kind of person who would read a particular book or listen to a particular song. Your public identity may be distorted by fragments of information that have little to do with how you define yourself. In a world where citizens are bombarded with information, people form impressions quickly, based on sound bites, and these brief impressions tend to oversimplify and misrepresent our complicated and often contradictory characters.

THE DEFENDERS OF INFORMATION TRANSPARENCY CONFUSE PRIVACY WITH SECRECY

Jeffrey Rosen, associate professor at the George Washington University Law School, The New York Times April 30, 2000, SECTION: Section 6; Page 46; TITLE: The Eroded Self // acs-EE2001

But the defenders of transparency are confusing secrecy with privacy, and secrecy is only a small dimension of privacy. Even if we saw an Amazon.com profile of everything the Charles Schwab employee had read and downloaded this week, we wouldn't come close to knowing who she really is. (Instead, we would misjudge her in all sorts of new ways.) In a surreal world where complete logs of every citizen's reading habits were available on the Internet, the limits of other citizens' attention spans would guarantee that no one could focus long enough to read someone else's browsing logs from beginning to end. Instead, overwhelmed by information, citizens would change the channel or click to a more interesting Web site.