Christopher Allen has been thinking a lot about privacy lately, especially in relation to social networking software. Allen understands the concepts of privacy related to networked environments at a very deep level, noting that even when he was developing products that used encryption technologies, he spoke precisely about confidentiality and authentication, but not privacy. “Promising privacy was too much.”
While at this year’s Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Berkeley, Allen’s thoughts about privacy congealed, and the result is his most excellent “Four Kinds of Privacy.”
According to Allen, when we speak about privacy we’re actually speaking about four distinct forms that, while related, are not the same (although they do intersect) :
- Defensive privacy is information about me that I don’t want revealed because it makes me feel vulnerable in some way.
- Human-rights privacy is what most Europeans mean when they talk about privacy-the levels to which governments, rather than individuals, can abuse personal information.
- Personal privacy is somewhat peculiar to the United States and is embodied in what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis recognized in 1890 as “the right to be left alone.”
- Contextual privacy is related to an “inappropriate level of intimacy,” according to Allen, or what Danah Boyd has identified as the “ickiness factor.”
Take the time to read Allen’s essay; it doesn’t take long to read, but it’ll keep you busy for a good long while.
I like your change of the words in the title of my piece from “kinds of” to “flavors of”. I think the words much better express the incomplete differentiation between these different meanings of privacy.