An Ethical And (Somewhat) Legal Framework Surrounding Private Individual Databases
Most of us consider ourselves private individuals. We live, eat, sleep, and go to work. We have a small circle of friends, (maybe) a partner and family, and we stay within that group of people. We are a speck to the world at large, and don’t think about the personal matters of other individuals around us much. We can make non-illegal mistakes without the press covering us, and our actions and interactions are for us and our respective social groups, but not anybody else.
As private individuals, we should have a right to privacy. Multiple privacy protections exist in other aspects, not just for people, but also for businesses and other entities, and they serve to keep us safe from exploitation by scammers, blackmailers, or cyberthieves. It is important that we are able to keep our financial and health information away from prying eyes because of this reason. I have seen ads about encrypted messaging networks with privacy on both ends, health data kept safe without leaks, and other forms of cybersecurity protections. If we care about this form of privacy, we should also care about our social privacy as well.
To cite privacy as a real right, we must consider the privacy rights and responsibilities between us and our fellow citizens. Since most precedents for privacy have been between citizens and the government, there are few legal protections for privacy violations between citizens today. However, with the rise of social media, we must consider the ability for citizens themselves to amass and infringe on the privacy of other citizens in their community.
In an Instagram video, there is a very prominent example of just that. In it, a woman said that there was a mass of people asking and farming information on private interactions they had with their peers. I was angry about why this is even allowed. Nobody is truly private if their personal interactions with other peers are accessible by a complete stranger who asked about them, nor if there is a pseudoentity of them that they have no control over in a mass database.
Gossip is an annoyance, but it is not a problem. Few of us like knowing that our peers are talking about us behind our backs, but we accept this as a non-consequential part of being human. However, having strangers be able to access our private interactions is something we should care about. Our peers being willing to betray information meant to be kept between us and them to somebody they don’t even know is something to worry about, and doing this on a mass scale is a danger to our individuality. It cheapens our own presence and allows every assessment being made on us, without us having a chance to present yourself.
Private individual databases are a major violation of any person’s privacy and must be dealt with. However, in the United States, we don’t have the privacy laws necessary to deal with something like this. To familiarize ourselves with this topic, we will cover privacy laws in other sections of the world(the EU), give a brief history of privacy advocates in American history, and show a major difference between free speech and free plastering of private individuals to further our knowledge about this topic.
Right To Be Forgotten
In the EU, one major law that enshrines personal privacy is the right to be forgotten. This law was passed back in 2014, stating, “The data subject shall have the right to…erasure of personal data concerning him or her without undue delay and the controller [should] … erase personal data without undue delay”(GDPR EU, Section 2). In other words, it allows people to request that certain data(articles, photos) about them be deleted by the owners of the data, or that Google doesn’t provide links to that data.
If the data meets certain specifications, it has to be deleted. Those specifications include irrelevance, revocation of consent to have the data, no legitimate reasons, using data for monetary gain, processing someone’s data unlawfully, or in compliance with a court order. However, there can be a case for not removing data when it is being used for freedom of speech, public health, providing information to preventative/occupational medicinists, or is in the public interest and can provide scientific, historical, or statistical information and could impede human progress(GDPR EU, Section 3).
In the United States, 74% of Americans would rather support a right to be forgotten than the ability to find a lot of information about their peers(Pew, Section 1). For young adults, 77% believe that potentially embarrassing photos and videos should be removed, 57% believe that info about their employment history or work record should be removed, 46% believe that negative media coverage should be removed, and 36% believe that criminal data should be removed(Pew, Section 2, part 2).
The right to be forgotten is a very interesting premise, as it seems to be a necessary part of the modern Internet to protect the interests of changing people.
Multiple video compilations online showcase people’s bad moments. Public freakout videos rack up hundreds of thousands of views and they paint the person captured in the worst possible light. We say bad people get bad consequences, but having a video of a bad moment following someone for the rest of their life is a very harsh consequence for one outburst. Not only that, but watching strangers comment on them in an impersonal and negative manner could make it harder to make friends in fear that anybody searches them up online and finds the video.
Rehabilitated criminals might be a more controversial application, but after they go to jail, spend a few years with a criminal record, and become a better person, it should be a good idea to remove references to their crimes and let them move on. Unless they committed a crime that severely damaged the way somebody else lives, we can consider forgiving their misdeeds and moving on.
One of the best ways to win a right to be forgotten case is to show that the person we are now is different from the person on the record or video. There are many different examples of a right to be forgotten case online for people to see. Lawyers can give testimonies to multiple different people who all attest that we have changed our behaviors and are not the person we used to be anymore. Then Google or the site holding our data has the obligation to delete it or unlink it from a public search.
A good way to have a more humane society is when bad behavior is still punished, but the doers are given a second chance and can start over again. Branding someone is a very serious thing to do and even though it is not a violent punishment, it can still be just as damaging and distressing to the branded person.
A History Of American Privacy Advocates
In our own country, no such laws exist, at least not yet. However, we have in our history several privacy advocates who attempted to strengthen our privacy laws. Two such candidates include Louis Brandeis and Judith Jarvis Johnson, whose arguments we will elaborate on.
Louis Brandeis was one of the champions of privacy reforms in the United States. In 1890, he was representing a man named Samuel Warren, whose wife had her private group’s activities scattered in the newspaper(Quinn 5.2.3, 3rd section). He made the case that the newspaper was infringing on her privacy, and made two daring claims to the crowd.
The first claim that Brandeis made was that “Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious, but has become a trade, which is pursued with industry as well as effrontery(disrespect).”(Quinn 5.2.3, 3rd section) This is an important statement, because by characterizing old gossip as idle and vicious, Brandeis is saying that old gossip holds no real power. A few gossips get together to talk about their peers and that is it. No harm is done and nobody’s privacy gets violated in the process. However, by calling gossip a trade, and an industry, he states that publicizing people’s private lives has become a profitable business that wishes to stay. Moreover, his usage of the word effrontery suggests that the newspapers have no regard for the individuals they are reporting on or how their stories will affect them personally, which is no way to treat another person. Brandeis has made the claim that we have gone from harmless, local grapevine gossip to organized incursions on other people’s privacy through the use of the newspaper.
The second claim that Brandeis made was that “modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon [someone’s] privacy, subjected [them] to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury.”(Quinn 5.2.3, 3rd section) This claim by Brandeis is backed up by an article in GoodTherapy, which states that privacy increases the sense of control we have over our lives, and that sense is lost when we feel we are being watched. It goes on to state that surveillance increases our anxiety, which then raises our blood pressure, increases our risk of obesity, breathing and digesting problems, and even cancer(GoodTherapy, section 3).
Later on, a judge named Judith Jarvis Thomson had her own interpretation of privacy. She says that older privacy advocates said that privacy is ‘the right to be left alone’. However, she feels like this interpretation is too narrow and defines privacy as a cluster of rights, and each specific violation of a right to privacy is a violation of another right we have(Quinn 5.2.3, 4th section).
We can apply this to the idea of crowdsourced private individual databases. One right that is violated with invasion of privacy is the right of a person to equality. The expected state that we have with our peers is that we are equals. No person is above another, no one is below in terms of our humanity, regardless of the roles we have respective to one another. Nobody wants to look at their peer and imagine that their eyes and ears are digitally connected to the eyes and ears of tens of thousands of other people that could be watching them. This violates the notion of equality between two people because one person becomes an overseer while the other person becomes a post they can’t control. This dramatically changes the personal status between the two individuals and therefore destroys the equality between them.
Another right that is violated is a person’s safety and security. Most people have things about us we want to keep secret. If that stuff is known by someone out to get them, they can then use that information to try to blackmail the person in a very unfair way. Using the bad things we know about somebody in order to control them is a very unethical use of information, as we are now warping our sense of right and wrong to extract personal benefit, and no one should be allowed that power.
The final right that is violated by crowdsourced private individual databases is the right to the pursuit of happiness. This could mean somebody trying to get a job, make friends, or get into a relationship. Having a version of yourself with negative comments by peers you know is not only a betrayal of trust between you and your friends, but a chaining of a person to a version of themself they would like the world to forget. We have talked about the right to be forgotten in Europe, and putting somebody else’s private interactions online for the world to see is a gross violation of that. We deserve to know that we have the right to be free and move on from who we were once ago and be a better person. That is one of the hallmarks of a humane society in which we all want to live.
Private Individual Databases vs Free Speech
Despite all this, some people will claim that people coming together on a large-scale to talk and exchange details about interactions they had with a close peer is just their freedom of speech. On the surface, these are indeed acts of free speech. However, when we look both bigger and deeper, we can see that this is anything but.
There is a clear reason why the First Amendment to the US constitution was written. Its function is to allow people free expression of ideas and opinions towards the government and its constituents, laws and regulations, public figures, social/economic/political institutions, local, state, and federal in order to keep them accountable. In addition, the First Amendment gives people the legal right to express themselves culturally, allowing them to identify with cultural and ideological movements that are agreeable, neutral, and countercultural to the given norm in a particular area, as well as protecting an individual’s right to try forming their own cultural and ideological movement.
What all these examples have in common is that they are of public concern. Politicians write and approve laws that trickle down into our daily lives. The media has a huge influence on the culture we see, and businesses on what money we are able to make and what we are able to buy. The government, its policies, and the culture around us impact us and it is necessary for citizens to have a stake in it. These are things that directly affect the public and are matters that the people have every right to have an opinion on.
These freedoms allow the heights of human creativity to flourish, giving rise to better laws, art, music, ideas, and ways of life that couldn’t exist if the government was allowed to stomp them out.
There is no problem with talking about somebody. We talk about our friends and the people around us to the people close to us and the people close to them, nor is it a problem with sharing a story about anonymous people in full detail about interactions we have had with somebody else online. The former is an important way of communal bonding through informing the people around us about our daily lives and experiences, as well as getting advice from close friends. The latter could help strangers understand their situation better. If they can relate to the story or situation, they can learn from the shared story and gain a higher stand on their situation. Such information-sharing allows us to become better, more well-informed, and wiser people. However, it is important to emphasize that online story-telling should include anonymity for any of the parties being characterized so as to protect the privacy of the individuals being mentioned.
What I am strongly in disagreement with is the idea that private individuals should be allowed to organize in order to divulge private interactions between themself and another individual to anybody who asks for it. This creates a net-negative harm to anybody being divulged in such a manner, and its effects are ultimately a detriment to the spirit of the First Amendment itself.
Having this type of monitoring done, especially by a close peer or friend, hurts the trust in whoever is being monitored, when they know their peer will betray secrets and one-to-one moments with them to someone they barely know. Organically, our knowledge of a person should come from the experiences we have had with them ourselves and not from solicited information from strangers’ private interactions with them.
More importantly, when people are monitored or feel monitored, they are less willing to speak or build close connections and more willing to follow whatever program is in power and stay silent. This hurts their creativity and willingness to express themselves if doing so makes them a caricature in the eyes of a new friend, partner, or peer who decides to make an inquiry into them. By monitoring each other, we have hurt the free flow and exchange of ideas themselves by replacing exchange of ideas with exchange of private interactions.
The fact that mass peer monitoring of private individuals stifles our willingness to speak boldly and act in more profound ways hurts us. This limits the ideas we are able to hear and the many eccentricities we might find out about our peers as we get to know them over time whereas if we are given a detailed description of the private person instead of being in their presence ourselves. This restriction on a person’s ability to experiment in fear of public social plastering and shame is directly counterproductive to the spirit of the First Amendment itself, which sought to help human creativity and logical reasoning flourish. Therefore, this scale of human gossip about our peers should be classified as a violation of personal privacy rather than an exercise of free speech.
This example has many immoral parts to it that go beyond rude remarks and nasty statements. The ability to monitor an individual whose status should be private, the anxious and self-shrinking feelings one gets when they feel watched, the sheer difference in power level between two peers, and the decreased willingness of citizens to speak their mind are plenty of reasons why this is not just a surface-level wrongdoing, but a systemic wrongdoing, which make this an abuse of the First Amendment and therefore not worthy of protecting.
Conclusion
We have a responsibility to protect our privacy. What is at stake is not just not having other people talk about us, but having an organized database for people to gather and create pseudo-entities of other people that they have no control over. This takes away the person’s ability to be seen as the person they are and rather an entry online.
It breaks the equality between two peers, giving one the status of overseer and the other the status of an inanimate post online. Our peer-to-peer relationships are built on our ability to see each other eye-to-eye and one-on-one. Having one person be able to diminish another and having the other person be diminished destroys the peer-to-peer bond and sours the relationship between two people.
We have a responsibility to keep each other safe, and allowing people to dig up ‘dirt’ on their peers opens the door to blackmail and other types of distortions of right and wrong for someone’s personal gain. People deserve to feel safe and secure, and not have their mistakes held against them by a crooked figure.
We are all on our own journey of self-discovery, self-adventure, and the pursuit of happiness. To do so, we might need to meet new people, new friends, new romantic relationships, and new careers. To have a database entry brand us to other people’s perceptions of us, true or not true, impedes our ability to walk forward and not have our new self be clouded by an image of who we used to be according to someone else. People deserve the right to move on, or the right to be forgotten.
Moreover, we deserve the right to speak freely without being publicly shamed for it. A database of private individuals is a perfect way to exercise shame or mass social control on people. If somebody says or does something someone else doesn’t like, they can be plastered and shamed without their knowledge. This is an act that is incompatible with a society that values the free expressions of thoughts and opinions. Even if the act of talking about somebody else is a form of free speech, the organization of a mass of people far and wide only disempowers the private individual from free speech.
We have to stand for our privacy rights right now. There is a private individual database, the one that the woman on Instagram talked about that exists right now, and privacy itself is undermined in a way never before seen. In the words of Thomas Paine,
“THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”
We can stand and talk about privacy and second chances when we have them, but if we let a database stand because ‘that is just the way it is now’, then we are only a summer soldier who never stood for privacy in the first place. We only stand for it while it is strong, but relinquish it when it gets trampled. If we truly believe in our right to privacy, we have a duty to fight for it right now. Even if the fight could be long, it will be worth it if we can get a class-action lawsuit and new laws on the books built on the arguments above and in this Substack. If you want to help us, join our Reddit sub at AWDTSGisToxic (reddit.com). We are 2,750 strong, and we need new members to fight the tens of thousands of privacy invaders in every metropolis. We will welcome all new privacy crusaders that we can.
Bibliography
Essay Sources:
Everything you need to know about the "Right to be forgotten" - GDPR.eu
Most Americans support the right to be forgotten online | Pew Research Center
Right To Be Forgotten Lawyers - A right to be forgotten
5.2: Perspectives on Privacy (pearson.com)
GoodTherapy | Watch Out: The Psychological Effects of Mass Surveillance
Pictures(Because they are copyrighted, and not okay to just take off the Internet due to ‘commentary, criticism, or parody’ according to Facebook)