PRIVACY: A PHILOSOPHICAL, LEGAL, BUSINESS, AND TECHNICAL PERSPECTIVE

Privacy, while rarely a major social concern before 1900, has recently become a high profile issue, bordering on obsession for the general public as well as for the computer and the business worlds. Discussants of privacy rights often take much for granted, and in the most extreme cases, their assertions about privacy and rights are made in a tone of almost axiomatic self-certainty. They typically proceed with the full expectation that the intended audience will assent to the spokespersons positions without question. There have been many proposed and actual extensions of the scope of privacy, which have now progressed to demands for shielding virtually all information about anything an individual might wish to keep secret, despite the existence of reasonable, competing values. For example, in the US, a student has a legal right to keep his/her parents, whether they defray the students tuition or not, from ever learning from a university that the student has failed every course. The most common starting point for discussions on privacy is that it is a natural, inviolable right as well as an important value. When a value-laden policy position has attained such unquestioned influence, it is both appropriate and timely to examine critically the extent of its applicability and whether it in fact embodies the overarching values (Gurak 2002) attributed to it. This paper attempts just such an analysis from an informatio