Privacy in the (Post-)Digital Era
[T]he majority of the communications in our [NSA] databases are not the communications of targets, they’re the communications of ordinary people…. They’re the most deep and intense and intimate and damaging private moments of their lives, and we’re seizing [them] without any authorisation, without any reason … their cell phone locations, their purchase records, their private text messages, their phone calls, the content of those calls in certain circumstances, transaction histories – and from this we can create a perfect, or nearly perfect, record of each individual’s activity, and those activities are increasingly becoming permanent records. These diverse perspectives on privacy lead us into initial reflections and then exercises on privacy and anonymity online. Following some cautions regarding the notion and possible (mis)uses of “culture,” we explore how different people in different cultures understand and value “privacy” and private life in different ways. We then examine the important meta-ethical positions of ethical absolutism, ethical relativism, and ethical pluralism. These positions shape our responses to the diversity of cultural views and beliefs regarding privacy – diversity that must be preserved, in my view, alongside any effort to establish a global ethics of norms and practices that are shared around the world.
