Privacy for Whom?

I've been feeling under the weather of late, so no entries for a while.  I am a little more perky today.

It has been for some time that I have been concerned about our current claims regarding personal privacy.  The matter raises itself for me in two primary ways.  Perhaps the most immediate of the two is the rising tide of concerns about identity theft.  There seems considerable evidence that this is not a concern without some merit.  Although, aside from having credit cards compromised, I feel happy not to have had a real brush with this issue.  And we do take care in terms of pin numbers, passwords, and even shredding documents with any identifying characteristics.

However, it is the second theme about privacy that has my attention today.  This privacy theme appears for me most commonly when I hear or read about some institutional official making the statement that s/he is not at liberty to comment about some matter or incident, 'due to privacy concerns'.  Usually this remark arises in the context of an alleged transgression of one sort or another, or a conflict.  Often the issue involves an individual or group dealing with an institution, either government or non-government.

In referencing the above claim to being concerned about privacy, I also include the ever-more common claim, that one cannot comment on 'matters before the court'.  Or another version is that one cannot comment on matters before some investigating body, such as the police, or a committee.

So, as the observer or community member struggles to make some sense of an event or conflict, instead of transparency and disclosure of helpful information, often one is left with the stone-wall remark that information cannot be shared due to privacy concerns or other protocols aimed at keeping matters opaque.

I cannot help but feel that such an approach perhaps serves the institutional interests more than it does the interests of the individual(s) who are on the other side of the transaction.

But an overriding notion attached to all this current concern for privacy seems to be related to an idea that one is protecting a sacred, privacy sensibility rooted in earlier times.  I think not.

Because I do genealogical inquiry, I find myself often reading information generated by the media (usually news papers) from the 19th century and earlier.  My own experience in this regard is that some of us today would be left cringing by information which apparently was quite public in the past.  For example, I have seen news reports relating to the probate of a will, in which the news report indicated and named quite clearly, the individuals who had been named beneficiaries and their relationship to the deceased.

I have seen news reports indicating details of the mental health matters related to a member of the community who took his/her own life.

And the 'social columns' of most early newspapers, contained information about who was visiting whom, and many details about the various life events of every-day members of the community.  Some reports about their activities in other locals.  It was not uncommon for the newspaper to publish the names of individuals who had registered overnight in the local hotel(s).

All these things make me really wonder about whose interests are served by the current claims to be 'protecting privacy'?