*http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/privacy_chapter/privacy.htm*
David Friedman, 2005
An old science fiction novel features a device that surrounds its bearer with an impenetrable bubble of force. The inventor rapidly discovers that every government and political faction on the planet wants what he has and is prepared to use any means, from persuasion to brute force, to get it. Our hero spends most of the book alternately listening to arguments, trying to decide who are the good guys and using his invention to help him escape attempts to capture him.
After about a hundred and fifty pages he realizes that he has been asking the wrong question. The answer to "what faction can be trusted with a monopoly over the shield" is "no." The right question is how the shield will affect the world--how it will alter the balance between freedom and oppression, individual and state, small and big. The answer to that is easy. A world where the random individual is armored against anything short of an atomic explosion will be, on net, a better and freer world than the one he is currently living in. He writes out an explanation of how the shield works and spends two days distributing the information to people all over the world. By the time Military Security--the most formidable of his pursuers--catches up with him, it is too late. The cat is out of the bag.
Poul Anderson's shield is fiction. The nearest real world equivalent is privacy--my control over other people's access to information about me. Neither my government nor my neighbor can punish my thoughts, because neither can read my mind. That is why thoughts are free. However much other people are offended by what I write, they cannot retaliate unless they know who wrote it, what he looks like, where he lives. That is why Salmon Rushdie is still alive despite the death sentence passed on the author of The Satanic Verses fifteen years ago by Iranian authorities.
Defensive weapons can be used for bad purposes; an impenetrable shield would be very useful for a bank robber. But it would be even more useful for the bank teller. Robbing banks would be harder in a world where everyone had the shield than in a world where nobody did.
The ability to control other people's access to information about you can be used for bad purposes too. That is the usual argument against privacy--"If you haven't done anything wrong, what do you have to hide?" The ability to conceal past crimes from the police and potential victims is useful to a robber. But the ability to conceal what I have that is worth stealing, where it is, how it is protected, is equally useful to the potential victim. Broadly stated, privacy gives each of us more control over his own life--which on average, if not in every case, is likely to lead to a freer world.
If I am a bad guy, the police are not the only people I might want to keep secrets from. When courting a wealthy widow, it helps if she does not know that my last three wives drowned in their bath tubs after taking out large life insurance policies. When borrowing money, it helps if the lender does not know that I have declared bankruptcy twice already.
But in a world of voluntary transactions--such as loans and marriages--my privacy does not require you to take me on faith. You have the option of not taking me. I have the power to keep my past defaults secret from a potential lender but he has the power to refuse to lend to me if I do. Privacy is my ability to control other people's access to information about me. That does not mean that they cannot get the information--only that they cannot get it without my permission. Someone who offers to take care of my children but refuses to allow me access to the records that would show whether or not he has ever been convicted of child abuse has already told me all I need to know.
In some contexts I am willing to let other people know things about me. In others I am eager to. If only lenders knew a little more about my finances I would not be interrupted at dinner by phone calls from people offering to refinance my nonexistent mortgage. If sellers were better informed about what sorts of things I was interested in buying, advertisements would be less of a nuisance and more of a service. Even in a world where I could keep information secret, I often would choose not to. Privacy provides me protection when I want it and only when I want it.
"Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is a force, like fire: a dangerous servant and a terrible master." George Washington
Privacy includes the ability to keep things secret from the government. The better I can do that, the less able government is to help me--I might be keeping secret my weakness for alcohol, or heroin, or gambling or pornography and so preventing the government from stepping in to protect me from myself. And the better other people can keep secrets from the government, the harder it is for the government to protect me from them. If you view government as a benevolent super being watching over you--a wise and kindly uncle with a long white beard--you will and should reject much of what I am saying.
But government is not Uncle Sam or a philosopher king. Government is a set of institutions through which human beings act for human purposes. Its special feature--what differentiates political action from the other ways in which we try to get what we want--is that government is permitted to use force to make people do things. A firm can try to fool me into giving it my money. A tax collector uses more direct methods. A preacher can try to persuade me to renounce my sins. The Drug Enforcement Administration, with the help of the local police, can arrange to have me locked up until I do.
Part of the genius of American political culture is the recognition that making it hard for governments to control people is not always a bad thing. Political mechanisms, even in a democracy, give us only very limited control over what government can do to us. Reducing government's ability to do bad things to us, at the cost of limiting its ability to protect us from bad things done to us by ourselves or by other people, may not be such a bad deal. And since government, unlike a private criminal, has overwhelming superiority of physical force, control over what information it can get about me is one of the few ways in which I can limit its ability to control me.
I have defined privacy and sketched the reasons why I think it is, on the whole, a good thing. The obvious next questions are where privacy comes from--what determines how much of it we have--and what we can and should do to get more of it.