The Privacy Wars
I seem to be having a lot of conversations about privacy these days.
In the APA I'm in, someone recently noted that their sister is reading the APA, and hoped this was okay. I think it's distinctly not okay with some members, although Turbo is not a private APA, but not entirely public, either (it's invitation-only, but unlike, say, APA-69, it doesn't have any privacy clauses in its by-laws). So of course people have differing assumptions about what's okay and what's not.
I know one person who has incredibly tight privacy needs, among the tightest I've ever known. Things about myself that I would not hesitate to tell any random person on the street are non grata when it's this person's life. It's unclear to me just what is causing this strong need for privacy, but perhaps I'm just not privy to the details.
For myself, I prefer not to have high privacy needs, not because I don't have things I'd rather keep hidden, but because I find that it gives me an ulcer to be worrying about it all the time. And as someone said to me not long ago, someone who has no secrets is someone who has few weak spots.
Of course, a big part of the problem is not my personal information, but what I know about other people. That's what makes writing this journal relatively difficult, since everyone's life is pretty tightly intertwined with those of half-a-dozen (or more) other people; how much can you tell the Internet in general about someone else's life? Not a whole lot, generally.
I've got a couple of long-time correspondents who seemed to have exactly opposite opinions on this matter: One of them felt that anything written in a personal letter was to be held in the strictest confidence, no matter the subject. The other felt that everything in a letter was perfectly open, unless specifically proscripted, or of obviously sensitive nature. At the time, I tended to lean toward the latter view. Now I'm somewhere in the middle.
I think that, to some degree, simply knowing someone and being part of their life means surrendering some degree of privacy about yourself. Certainly things that you do together in public places or say in the company of (essentially random) "others" are in the public domain, I think. And I think that you are trusting the other person's judgment as to what can and cannot be repeated. Figuring out how much judgment they have is part of knowing the person - as is understanding the privacy requirements of the person.
I myself would like to be in a situation where I have no secrets about myself, where I could simply tell anyone anything about myself. But I think those days are long-past. Especially since privacy isn't the only issue in such matters.
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