The privacy paradox: in keeping with the policy of the Humanist to accommodate the diverse cultural, social, political, and philosophical viewpoints of its readers, this occasional feature allows for the expression of alternative, dissenting, or opposing views on issues previously broached within these pages.

Eavesdropping on conversations is not as satisfying as it used to be. No more straining to decipher hushed murmurs, slyly feigning disinterest while fighting off twinges of guilt. The ubiquitous cell phone conspires with the now-entrenched belief that each of us has a life so interesting that everyone should know about it to take the sense of accomplishment out of snooping. While hunched over the newspaper having lunch at a coffee kiosk recently, I was distracted by a patron loudly narrating into his cell phone the details of a sexual adventure he had undertaken apparently under the radar of his already suspicious wife. As his story reached its climax, I happened to stumble across an article in my newspaper on the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness project (renamed Terrorism Information Awareness before being shut down by Congress)--a system of databases and information-mining technologies that allegedly would enable massive monitoring and tracking of individuals. When the happy conquistador had finished his call, I leaned over, pointed to the headline, and asked if he would mind sharing that information with the peeping toms at the Pentagon. He told me to mind my own business.

The right to privacy is fundamental to a free and flourishing society and a basic element of Humanism's defense of freedom of thought and personal fulfillment. Our natural tendency to absorb the feelings and judgments of others imprisons the psyche without the secret passageways of deliverance that privacy provides. Thus, our legal and political traditions carve out an area in which private individuals may act without public scrutiny, protecting our homes against intrusion and our thoughts and decisions from meddling authorities. But more than a legal protection, the pursuit of privacy has become a national obsession. Our homes are self-contained, impregnable fortresses inaccessible to the prying eyes of neighbors; our cars monuments to solitude hurtling past life's mise en scene behind barriers of metal and concrete. Calls for the privatization of everything from schools to water supplies congeal with the sacramental language of self-reliance, self-realization, and self-determination to place much of modern life within the realm of private choice.

Yet, as we continue to make a fetish of privacy, it is receding as rapidly as baby boomers' hairlines. Security devices undress us in public venues. Employers routinely monitor employees' communications. Identity theft has become a major criminal enterprise. Insurance companies will soon be rummaging through our genetic heritage, culling the dispossessed from their bottom line. Profiteers, monitoring surfing habits on the Internet, trade traces of guilty pleasures like pork-belly futures or leave them to be used by law enforcement to blackmail dissenters into conformity. Experts in the technology of surveillance promise a future of ubiquitous cameras, face recognition systems, and tracking devices to monitor the movement of individuals. In the interest of public safety, we publicize e-mail conversations of stock analysts, probe the content of travelers' luggage, and post the addresses of sexual predators on the Internet. In the interest of fairness, we monitor the bloodstreams of athletes and copy machine propositions by salacious supervisors. If these routine affronts to privacy weren't enough to stoke paranoia among the anonymous multitudes, the Patriot Act has law enforcement agog with a developing prurient interest in our reading habits and political activities.

It isn't only the government or big business pushing the boundaries of privacy. Daytime television has become a public confessional where ordinary citizens shamelessly submit the most sordid aspects of family strife or personal failure to the scrutiny of a national audience. The public, encouraged by an obliging media, voraciously gobbles up intimate details of the lives of public figures as if such information were an entitlement. Teenagers divulge their most intimate secrets on websites or in chat rooms hoping that confession is therapeutic. Topics of conversation that used to be inappropriate in public--sexual adventures, religious beliefs, one's annual income, Uncle Harry's alcohol problem--are now bandied about like the weather. Self-expression and voyeurism--two sides of the same coin--are our most promising growth industries.

Apparently, we are deeply conflicted about privacy. We crave privacy and take extraordinary measures to secure and protect it even as we routinely revel in its violation. If privacy is a fundamental right, this is an odd way to exercise it. I have a fundamental right not to be tortured--and never crave its violation! A right expresses an interest so important that it should not be violated except under the most extraordinary conditions. Yet, most of us are willing to fritter away privacy as if it were loose change. Does this paradoxical attitude toward privacy say something about us--carelessness regarding the boundaries between persons, the product of too much touchy-feely pop psychology and leftover 1960s' nonsense about the authenticity of "letting it all hang out?" Or does it say something about the concept of privacy itself--inherently ambiguous, enigmatic, and unstable?

Privacy's multiple meanings in part explain our paradoxical attitudes toward it. "Privacy" has a variety of related elements that point in different directions, so when we praise privacy we are often praising quite different things. We demand privacy of one sort--solitude-when we want to he left alone with the tumult of our thoughts and feelings. We seek privacy of a different sort--safe harbor--when exclusion of the public view allows the fuller expression of thoughts and feelings in intimate relationships. Solitude can inhibit intimacy just as intimacy can interfere with solitude. We withhold (or wish others would withhold) private thoughts and feelings that might cause conflict or embarrassment if made public. This form of privacy--more precisely, a sense of reticence--is what the patron of the coffee kiosk lacked with his immodest tale of sexual conquest. By contrast, when we resist efforts to have our e-mail monitored at work, we value anonymity rather than reticence. A disgruntled employee who makes scurrilous remarks about her boss in an e-mail may wish that everyone knows her boss is a scoundrel. She is not reticent but instead seeks anonymity, so those remarks cannot be traced to her.

Decisions to have an abortion, choose a marriage partner, or practice religion are private in a different sense. The outcomes of such decisions are likely to be visible to the public in ways that solitary pursuits, anonymous encounters, or intimate conversations aren't--they remain private even when known to the public. In these cases, the decision is private not because it is shielded from public view but because the person making the decision need not account for it publicly or subject it to approval by public institutions. In fact, nonaccountability is the best candidate for a core meaning to our concept of privacy. We protect solitude, anonymity, or intimacy when we wish to shield our thoughts and actions from public accountability.

The many facets of privacy notwithstanding, there are deeper reasons for our paradoxical attitude toward privacy. Despite our vast technologies of concealment, private matters are like blemishes or shortcomings--multiple angles of vision inevitably reveal them as public spectacle. Anonymity makes exhibitionists of even the shy and reticent. People reveal deep secrets in Internet chat rooms or hotel bars because of the anonymity achieved through virtual meetings, where disguise can mitigate the consequences of revealing private information. Similarly, if regulations permit us to conceal defective DNA code from the prying eyes of insurance companies, many will surely take advantage of this privacy protection by waving their genetic endowments in front of prospective employers or marriage partners. The sexual revolution has demonstrated that, the more we protect domains of intimacy from public surveillance and judgment, the more we engage in public displays of intimacy. When we protect a person's privacy, we enable the construction of that person's public face without the accountability of public censure. The private is publicity's beautiful consort, in attendance to keep up appearances but intent on stealing the show.

The reason for privacy's instability is that the point of privacy is not privacy itself but rather control over one's public presentation. Privacy is important because public scrutiny threatens the sphere of spontaneity and unpredictability that enables the richness and depth of personality. At any particular moment, much of what constitutes the self is too raw and unformed to fit the categories and stereotypes that permit social interaction. Wacky obsessions, abusive epithets, and delusional fantasies are part of the internal dialogue that makes up our individual points of view. When such rare meat is delivered to the public table before the juices have been seared and settled, we relinquish control over how others view us, turning public life into a carrion feast. (I have a friend whose sober, analytical reputation would not survive public knowledge of his obsession with alien abduction and his extensive collection of Gilligan's Island reruns.) Without privacy, we are held accountable before we can provide the account. In extremis, the demand to respond to others without relief shatters the personality, subverting the sense that my experience belongs to me and has a unity to it.

However, this sense of self-possession that privacy confers on our experience is only half the equation, for self-possession demands a public stage as well. Our private, inner world is an inchoate theater of muttering ambiguity, transitory imaginings, and airy speculations until cobbled into recognizable form by a public world demanding accountability. Hectoring relatives, fragile friends, and cajoling children are the artisans who construct my self-image, using language and social habits as building materials. Without relationships that demand responsiveness and a shared language of self-description, self-awareness disintegrates into a splintered mosaic of refracted images. The opportunity to make public use of my innermost beliefs and imaginings confirms that I really am who I think I am. I cannot judge my own thoughts and feelings or make them palpable without seeing how they play out in the public world. Privacy is essential to the construction of the self, but only if its violation is frequent and unpredictable.

Thus, religious devotees demonstrate, sexualities are paraded like flags on a battlefield, and human weakness gets its fifteen minutes of fame--not out of some peculiar exhibitionist fetish but because only through public expression can we claim ownership of the fleeting, ghostly emanations of private fantasy. To have control over my life involves being the kind of person I want to be and knowing whether I am that sort of person requires that I see how others view me. Though we need privacy, we can never be satisfied with it because only through public expression can we achieve the sense of personal integrity to which privacy contributes. Privacy is not an intrinsic good. It serves autonomy--our capacity for self-direction--and that sometimes requires privacy and sometimes requires its abandonment. As important as privacy is, we cannot be absolutists about its protection.

Contemporary political ideologies fail to grasp the many facets of privacy. Conservatives mourn the loss of public morality and demand more invasive public scrutiny of private attitudes but ignore the fact that, when the private psyche becomes a political battleground, self-determination is undermined, social peace is threatened, and individuals respond to the loss of self-possession through elaborate forms of deception and hypocrisy. Liberals fear the erosion of public solidarity and wish to shore it up by insisting we keep divisive attitudes and activities private, but they fail to recognize that any private attitude worth having demands public expression. Libertarians lament the loss of individual freedom when privacy is violated, forgetting that privacy without public accountability produces futile fantasies or virulently antisocial attitudes.

If the political debates of the recent past have been too crude to appreciate the finer points of privacy, wrangles over our technological future are likely to be even more opaque. The widget wizardry that enables instantaneous communications across vast distances promises to eliminate the geographical barriers to which human life has adapted. These innovations profoundly threaten privacy. The penetration of private space by information processors has only just begun, as we look "forward" to a future of ubiquitous cameras and devices that monitor everything from health to habitat--information that exists in the form of binary code for effortless but unfettered transmission. In the future, each of us will have our own impersonal biographer as search engines mine databases for every bit of trivia to feed the habits of information junkies.

Because our interest in privacy derives from a more fundamental interest in autonomy, we will continue to make trade-offs with these surveillance technologies, seeking privacy when it frees us from the constraints of publicity yet abandoning it when doing so will be to our advantage. However, effective trade-offs require that we distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate privacy concerns, that we accurately assess when public exposure will enhance autonomy and when it will not. Such judgments will be increasingly difficult because technological innovation is fundamentally changing the nature of privacy.

We have become accustomed to associating privacy with the "private spaces" to which we retreat to avoid pubic surveillance--geographical locations that protect us because they exist behind or beyond physical boundaries. We have arranged our lives so that private property, walls, fences, locks, and long distances enable us to avoid difficult choices about what to reveal or hide since most anything beyond those boundaries has been reasonably well protected by our own vigilance, the police, and the courts. Gaining access to such information used to require incurring physical risk, hardship, or a court order--obstacles most people were unwilling or unable to surmount.

However, physical barriers are no match for digital information technology, which is valuable just because its portability facilitates the linking of formerly independent data streams and provides access from anywhere at any time. Increasingly, privacy is no longer a matter of geographical location but of contract and agreement. We divulge mass quantities of digitally stored information, including what our preferences reveal of our innermost thoughts and desires, even as we try to regulate who is authorized to view the information. This information is protected solely by the willingness and ability of government to mandate privacy protections and of businesses and organizations to abide by their policies and implement sufficient digital security procedures. Given the interest that business and government have in acquiring and sharing information and the influence of the business community over legislation, this is an unstable foundation for privacy protection.

The banality of life provides us with some protection against invasions of privacy. Most of us lead lives sufficiently conventional and routine that much of the information collected is utterly insignificant to anyone but some marketer toiling in the minutiae of soap and soda preferences. That my supermarket knows of my addiction to coffee is hardly a threat. However, we ought not place much confidence in our insignificance. Identity theft, which succeeds by appropriating banal facts about individuals, is increasingly a menace, and financial and health information can be misused if it falls into the wrong hands. Moreover, the ordinariness of life often masks the active fantasies and eccentricities that provide life with its rich texture. The vibrancy of our culture depends on those whose lives transcend the conventional, whose preferences and patterns of behavior, though provoking consternation, ridicule, or disgust if exposed, supply critical opposition and creative energy to the exhausted, stodgy, and insipid. Freedom of speech and assembly would mean little if excessive surveillance disrupts our decisions regarding when to exercise them. The real danger of invasive technology--and the legal permissions, such as the Patriot Act, that facilitate its development--is that fear of exposure might cause us to think or act only in socially acceptable ways.

Admittedly, such dire consequences seem remote--the technology that would enable pervasive surveillance is in its developmental stages and the more dystopian extrapolations of current trends may be exaggerated. However, uncontroversial generalizations regarding human behavior suggest that we ought to be concerned about the future of privacy. Information is valuable because it enables anyone who acquires it to predict and control human behavior--and all of us are in that business. The success of most human endeavor depends on it. Thus, the desire to acquire information to predict and control human behavior in the pursuit of profit, security, and political power may exceed any natural constraints. Information has become the coin of the realm, and the mere possession of information will likely become a measure of status and the object of a ravenous quest that will engage the most creative imaginations in finding new ways to gather and use it. That some people have more money than they can possibly spend doesn't inhibit them from acquiring more--in the future, information may have a similar talismanic appeal.

How should we respond to these technological threats to privacy? The natural response is to battle increased surveillance with enhanced security. Public indignation over violations of privacy may be sufficient to encourage strict laws and regulations forbidding the gathering and transmitting of certain kinds of information. Recent legislative attempts to limit the transmitting of patients' medical records or to prevent financial corporations from sharing customer information are examples. However, the accomplishments of these legislative initiatives don't inspire confidence. Powerful interest groups that gain from the free flow of information either block passage of these initiatives or make sure they are so riddled with loopholes they do little to slow down the erosion of privacy.

Moreover, restricting the free flow of information through legislation and legal regulation has costs that may make these remedies unpalatable even to those whose privacy is protected. For example, though patients want to protect the confidentiality of medical records, they benefit in situations where emergency medical procedures require the ready accessibility of medical information. Similarly, numerous polls show the public is generally willing to accept the threat to privacy represented by the Patriot Act if it reduces the threat of terrorism. As I argued above, we cannot be absolutists about privacy protection. In a society so thoroughly dependent on the accessibility of digital information, judgments about what information is necessary and when it must be available are context-dependent and often must be made quickly. Laws, regulations, and the bureaucratic organizations that implement them lack the flexibility to make such contextual judgments. I doubt that legal and regulatory remedies will provide us with more than a porous patchwork of unwieldy safeguards.

Another way of hiding information in the face of the threat of surveillance is to engage in a technological arms race: developing security devices and defensive techniques as rapidly as surveillance techniques expand. But this is a battle the victims of surveillance are likely to lose. The concentrated resources of government and multinational corporations will likely out-produce even a vibrant grassroots campaign of technological innovation. The development of the Internet suggests that, although guerilla tactics can often survive and win a few battles, corporate interests tend to win out.

Moreover, technological innovation that excessively inhibits the surveillance capacity of government may go too far, undermining security without necessarily advancing privacy. Individuals and groups with private agendas threaten privacy and security as readily as government surveillance; technological advances that protect individuals from surveillance will make more difficult the appropriate surveillance of criminals, terrorists, and lunatics with dangerous tastes in entertainment. The excessive pursuit of secrecy fails to acknowledge the degree to which public expression and openness are essential in contemporary life.

Author David Brin in The Transparent Society (Perseus, 1998) suggests that we point technology in a different direction, away from security toward greater transparency. He argues that, since surveillance techniques will overwhelm any countermeasures we employ, we should abandon attempts to guarantee privacy, accept the free flow of information as the standard, but insist that we subject those who engage in surveillance to surveillance as well. Fear of being exposed as a snoop and thus having their own privacy invaded in retaliation will remove incentives for excessive surveillance. Bring idea is that a transparent society in which everyone is subject to being watched and held accountable will be less prone to error and abuses of power than a society in which only the powerful possess surveillance capability.

Brin's argument is extraordinarily sensitive to the virtues of publicity and openness but not convincing as a remedy for privacy worries. The same difficulties with attempts to protect privacy through greater security apply to attempts to protect privacy through reciprocal transparency. Powerful elites won't enable a legal and regulatory framework permitting surveillance of their activities. Neither will the technology of reciprocal surveillance to "watch the watchers" keep pace with the technology of surveillance. Those who control the financial and intellectual resources required to develop technology will have little interest in subjecting themselves to increased surveillance. Differences in wealth and social power effect the distribution of other goods in society; why is the distribution of privacy different in that regard?

Furthermore, in a surveillance society where openness is the standard, social norms that punish nosiness and voyeurism will probably take a back seat to norms that encourage curiosity and a willingness to share information, thus mitigating the social disapproval suffered by voyeurs. In any case, the survival advantage goes to those who endure surveillance without shame and can watch without compunction.

Given current trends, threats to privacy will likely continue apace. Though forms of resistance--legal and technological--may succeed in slowing down the erosion of privacy, there is little reason to be hopeful regarding privacy's long-range prospects. However, this gloomy prognostication will foretell our future only if we continue to think of privacy in terms of secrecy, reticence, and anonymity. The various meanings of privacy have nonaccountability at their core; and new forms of nonaccountability may arise to avoid the psychological costs of living with less privacy. Increased surveillance only has psychological costs if we find the gaze of others inhibiting. The accountability that publicity imposes is proportional to the significance we place on the judgment of others. Thus, a society of persons less concerned about the judgment of others and less inclined to judge others as well would be a society in which the importance of secrecy and anonymity would diminish--assuming of course a legal environment in which peccadilloes go unpunished.

When secrecy, reticence, and anonymity are hard to come by, we enjoy nonaccountability through the sort of resolute immodesty displayed by the coffee shop patron. Perhaps shame and moral indignation are anachronisms we cannot afford in a culture where dirty laundry is as commonplace as the proverbial (electronic) fly on the wall.

Dwight Furrow is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at San Diego Mesa College. He can be reached at: [e-mail].