Yes, I think posting this photo is a lousy thing to do to your dog, too.
The stories come out routinely, and the opposing opinions are predictable. A boorish date dumps a woman via arrogant e-mail, which is promptly forwarded to thousands, making him a national laughing stock and pariah. A movie star sends an angry and mean-spirited message to his teenage daughter, who places it in the hands of the celebrity-devouring media…which then use it to savage the star’s reputation. A Harvard law student takes an e-mail sent by a friend and fellow-student as a follow-up to a contentious discussion about race, and forwards it to minority advocates on campus, who then condemn the “friend” as a racist. A model live-tweets her encounter with the married actor sitting next to her on a flight, as he engages in awkward flirtation. In each case, defenders of the punitive distributor of the embarrassing communication argue that the victim deserved it, while critics of the conduct insist that it is a betrayal of privacy and trust.
We need to decide, as a culture, whether we believe that reasonable expectations of privacy should be respected or not; indeed, whether they should survive or not. Those who endorse, defend and encourage the kind of conduct in these incidents and many more are, whether they realize it or not, fouling the nest of our national culture and community, making not just privacy, but also friendship and intimacy, almost impossible.
Once, before e-mails, text-messages, phone taps, copy machines and surveillance devices, a private conversation between two people was presumed to be protected by a mutual bond of trust. Letters of portent, including scathing ones, were not copied and mailed all over the world. Outside of publishing such a letter in a book or newspaper, a rarely employed tactic, the sentiments so expressed would never be gazed at by eyes other than those for which they were intended. Why? Because to do otherwise was understood to be an outrageous breach of manners and a betrayal of trust….and so it was.
So it is still. Yet such conduct is rapidly becoming a social norm, because we are approaching a critical mass in members of the public and the media who are willing to tolerate and even encourage it. This, in turn, is occurring not because anyone has made a convincing ethical argument that it should be this way, but rather because unilaterally circulating private communications to embarrass one of the parties to it has become irresistibly simple, providing a devastating weapon for us to use those who have hurt us, insulted us, mistreated us, or annoyed us. It is the privacy bomb, and we need to ban it.
If we don’t, the future won’t be pleasant. No conversation or communications, no matter how intimate, fleeting, spontaneous, ill-considered, immediately regretted or inarticulate will be immune from being exploited for revenge, harm or mischief. Every one of our worst moments, instances of poor judgment or submissions to passion, anger or foolishness will be a candidate to become the standard by which we are judged by those who know us least. We will be able to trust no one, confide in nobody, have any confidante with whom we can be uninhibited, unguarded, ourselves. I don’t think we want to live in that culture, but it is the one we are slowly but surely building for ourselves and our children.
We can’t, and shouldn’t ban the privacy bomb with law, but with the enforcement of ethical standards. We should clearly embrace and enforce the principle that we all have the right to be accountable for our words and sentiments only to those we knowingly express them to. Communications not intended for public consumption ought to be rejected and ignored by the public, which should also make it clear to the media that it does not exist to facilitate eavesdroppers and voyeurs.
We need to be clear who the unethical party is, when a recipient distributes a private e-mail: it is that recipient, and the content of the message that is the object of the betrayal is irrelevant. We must not laugh or cheer when someone is betrayed and humiliated in this fashion, whether we dislike them or not. These victims are us. If we do not stand up for them and shun those who betrayed their trust, then we are giving our cultural permission to be treated in like fashion.
Let’s ban the privacy bomb. It is the ethical thing to do, and we will be sorry if we don’t do it.
And yes, it may already be too late.
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Graphic: DogStar Kennels
Ethics Alarms 
You nail it, Jack, when you mention “an outrageous breach of manners.” At its core, this whole issue boils down to rather basic Golden Rule stuff which, unfortunately, seems to be an idea that came more easily to us in years past. The conspiracy theorist in me says that all this public over sharing, slavish celebrity worship, and “infotainment” is just one more loaf of bread and another ring in the circus meant to distract us from more serious matters.
Yes, it is already too late to “ban the bomb.” But, there is another, more liberating way to regard and respond to humanity’s modern, self-inflicted Tower of Babel and its inevitable aftermath, which the newer devices and media have made unavoidable. It is unrealistic to expect a change in ethical norms that will censor betrayers and their betrayals in some preventative way.
The keys are in necessary cultural adjustments to notions of trust and accountability. Those adjustments must be learned, and learning reinforced by practice – and, by the pains of failure to learn. The “educational mission,” if not the syllabus and lesson outline of needed instruction, should already be clear to those of us who have already lived significant portions of our adult lives in both the “before” and “after” worlds of “social” media.
We who have had our privacy in both the old, more easily secured world, and who now have some aspects of our lives that we still (perhaps, in vain yet) desire to keep private in this new world of vulnerability, are perhaps in the best position to lead in educating others about the virtually privacy-bereft realities of now and the foreseeable future.
Big Brother is here; he just isn’t precisely the tyrant characterized in the Orwell novel. He does not (and cannot) require that we “love” him. He does not (and cannot) require any particular service or servitude. But our aspirations require US – we, who give a hoot – to love and possess more than ever, and to forever love and possess more than he is capable of loving and possessing, what he loves and is capable of possessing of us: control.
Just imagine: a whole new batch of children’s games, geared to instill communications discipline in individuals so that they can cope with the fact that anything, absolutely anything, which a person might not want the whole world to know, one day may be long unknown to any but the one, but then suddenly, within minutes, seconds, may be known to the whole world.
A world like that – like our world now – inherently incentivizes individuals to be honest in every moment. If you know you can’t hide, why waste time and energy trying? Why bob and weave and dodge and blame-shift all self-righteously, and imagine that you can slip into some cloud bank, like some World War I aerial ace evading bullets, when you know there is no cloud? Contrary to the lie being taught as truth today (and practiced to so much seeming “success”), you can control one world of a lot more by being honest, than you can control by being dishonest.
Even before they knew how to “keep secrets,” I taught my kids that “a secret is something that only one person knows,” and “lies are things that a person cannot keep secret.” Are my kids consequently paranoid? No. Are they able to self-protect, and are they satisfied with their ability to self-protect? Yes. Are they trustworthy? They may not necessarily be any more or less trustworthy than anyone else. But, I know they have learned from me (1) what honesty is, (2) what honesty requires of them, and (3) what costs they can expect to bear for being dishonest.
Honest people are still going to betray others. Even trustworthy people are still going to betray others – and yet, somehow, even some of those betrayers are going to remain trustworthy – and even, not due to the fault of the others who trust them, or continue trusting them. The utility of denial can be awesome, even if depressing. We see that, not just in individuals, but in groups; it is an essence of tribalism, the lying that is the best-kept “secret” of those who don’t even realize they are lying. Those are hard realities for anyone to wrap their head around. But that’s how it is. We must adjust our attitudes toward our own victimhood; that, we can control.
We should embrace the principle that we all have the duty to be accountable for our words and sentiments to anyone and everyone who comes to know of them, and not only to those we knowingly express them to. Communications not intended for public consumption but which nevertheless become public, we must own and defend – or, own and retract – with the same honesty which we exercised, or should have exercised, when we initially communicated.
What about when the communications in question are deliberately faked by the original source – but then widely propagated as fact by innocents?
If we over-value privacy, there is no means of debunking these. If everything’s open, it’s at least possible, though may not be easy.
I certainly find that assuming that anything I say over phone, e-mail etc could appear on scandal-sheets the next day is a prudent move.
Privacy may be desirable, but I think that horse has bolted.
Anything said or written to me in confidence I keep confidential; but have no power over 3rd parties intercepting it. That such interceptions are routine is something most don’t realise – the only protection is “security through obscurity”, the intercepted traffic is so many terrabytes/sec that pattern-recognisers have to be fairly crude, and be clued in on what to look for. .
It’s illegal for the US to “spy” on their own citizens in the US this way: but it’s fine for allied countries to do it, and hand product to the US. In return for the US doing the same for them, quid pro quo.
Here’s what it known, or thought to be known, about such systems, should they exist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
Having done work in secure diplomatic communications, I can neither confirm nor deny etc etc. The systems are technically not just possible but feasible, whether they exist or not, if I knew I couldn’t say, and can’t even say whether I know or not.
Obviously if they do exist they’re very imperfect.