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Information Privacy: Gone too far
by Scott Jones
Writer's Profile: Scott is a 2nd term MLIS candidate at the University of Western Ontario. He currently holds a BA with a honors specialization in History from the King's University College at the University of Western Ontario. Scott has recently been active in professional discussions involving copyright and perceptions of libraries and librarians.
There is a lot of talk in our field and also on open message boards about freedom of information, access to information and advocacy for such actions. Everyone seems to think that with the advent of the internet, that information is just a few clicks away and that we all have the right to all this information, but I am not going to talk about access and freedom of information; rather I am going to bring up the other side of this argument: privacy. Privacy is something that many people, some who advocate for freedom of information, as well as those who do not, care deeply about; they fight tooth and nail for the right to their own privacy, but want access to all other information. I propose that there is such a thing as too much privacy.
Many of you are likely reading that last line and thinking I must be insane and/or joking. This is not true: I am quite sane and very serious. As a history major, I have been privy to a lot of information, that at the time the documents were created, was never intended to pass by my eyes, let alone be used in academic papers. Many of these documents were either medical records, private letters or financial records; these are some very important documents in conducting historical research, not to mention business, English and sociological research. What would happen if the people of the past guarded information in the same manner we do today? Archives would be barren, as many of those documents are of a personal or private nature. If everyone just destroyed all their private documents, as many businesses do today with their financial documents, we would have little to no financial history or statistics to compare our recent recession to the great depression of the 1930's, for example.
I understand that the census now has an option to not allow the release of information if a responder does not want it released; that being the case, what is the point of filling out a census with so much information if no one is going to be able to use the data? It seems counter productive and to only protect their privacy today, yet hurt our society for years after the person has passed away. Essentially we are restricting important information for the sake of over concerned people who are worried that some historian or business major might find out a male in southern British Columbia made $40,000 in the 2011 fiscal year. People seem to think that everyone who looks at that information is going to run with it and steal their identity. The Canadian government has laws and major penalties for information leaks; there is no way to avoid it completely, but it is fairly general information and unlikely to be elicited for unscrupulous purposes. If you have a birth certificate, health card, debit card, or student debt, you are having information collected on you as you read this. Total privacy is not practical and worrying about it to the extreme which hurts the future of information that could be used for positive purposes is not helpful for information professionals, academics or society.
