The value of privacy

Do we give privacy the value it DESERVES?

Published in

Introduction to Social Media

2 min readMar 19, 2014

When reading the question that’s in this story’s subtitle, one may actually understand it as if we give privacy less value than we should. Actually, I think it’s quite the opposite. Privacy IS important, but sometimes we seem to ignore the value of publicness, which is great! Of course, the way companies (and government) deal with our information right now MAY not be the ideal, but I think we could use a bit of calming down before going all “torches and pitchforks” at their gates.

I’ve seen people complaining about how our lives are apparently being watched all the time, which is partially correct. However, a (not so small) fraction of this group fails to see the bright side of it. Take, for example, the Boston Marathon bombing incident: if it wasn’t for the surveillance cameras’ images, maybe the Tsarnaev brothers would have remained free, possibly managing to pull off a successful attack to Times Square. Publicness promotes transparency and enables a whole new level of interaction that wasn’t possible before (yes, I do enjoy things like targeted advertising). Sure, there are some things that we would rather not share with whoever-collects-our-data (and that’s perfectly fine), but the limits between what can be collected and what can’t be collected are too subtle and subjective, and that leads me to think that when it comes to privacy, we don’t always ask for what’s fair.

In my opinion, fighting for openness and transparency is the banner we should carry with us, rather than dictating which kind of information about us can be shared and which can’t. Forcing companies to tell us what they know and what they are doing with what they know (as well as allowing us to immediately opt out and have our data erased) would end up avoiding information-related abuse without closing doors to the benefits that both innovation and technology can bring us. Having said that, I must make it clear that this is my opinion on the subject, and I would appreciate much if you have something to add concerning the subject (it doesn’t matter if you agree or not!). Thank you for reading.

The value of privacy

Do we give privacy the value it DESERVES?

References and recommended readings:

Written by Daniel Oliveira