“Privacy” is a single word that people use to mean many, many different things. In “A Taxonomy of Privacy”.pdf), Daniel Solove identifies sixteen distinct sorts of harms that people group under the notion of harms to “privacy”:
Surveillance — someone spying on you, tapping your calls, etc.;
Interrogation — someone making you answer questions, testify against yourself, etc.;
Aggregation — someone assembling dossiers or profiles about you;
Identification — someone tracking you from here to there, or making you do so yourself by carrying papers;
Insecurity — someone gaining illicit access to records legitimately kept about or for you;
Secondary use — someone taking records that were made for one purpose, and turning them to another purpose;
Exclusion — someone refusing to tell you what records are kept about you, or to correct mistakes;
Breach of confidentiality — someone leaking something that you told them in confidence;
Disclosure — someone leaking something that damages your reputation or your safety;
Exposure — someone intruding on you in activities that are conventionally private, such as defecation or grieving;
Increased accessibility — someone making it easier for others to get records about you that were hard to obtain before;
Blackmail — someone threatening to expose something about you in order to gain power over you;
Appropriation — someone using your image or name to promote a product or other goals;
Distortion — someone saying false or misleading things that hurt your reputation;
Intrusion — someone entering your home or private places without your consent;
Decisional interference — someone denying you information, or manipulating you, regarding personal matters such as sexuality and reproduction.
I was using it in the loose sense of “how much effort should I put into making it difficult to ascertain my real life identity.”
That is a very useful taxonomy, I may reference it in another project I’m working on analysing why people value privacy (and whether they should). The main motivation seems to be the ‘icky’ feeling people get at the thought of being observed, not any expected harms. Which means they are unwilling to accept small violations of privacy that would have massive social benefits (e.g. supplying police with all citizens fingerprints and DNA would massively reduce the number of unsolved crimes, with very minimal possibility for abuse).
supplying police with all citizens fingerprints and DNA would massively reduce the number of unsolved crimes
This might be overselling it. Only about a quarter of criminal offences are recorded by the police, and they already solve some crimes despite incomplete fingerprint & DNA databases. So even if expanding the databases meant the police solved every crime they recorded, the number of unsolved crimes would fall by at most 20% (unless there were a reason to expect reporting/recording of crimes to rise as well).
“Privacy” is a single word that people use to mean many, many different things. In “A Taxonomy of Privacy”.pdf), Daniel Solove identifies sixteen distinct sorts of harms that people group under the notion of harms to “privacy”:
Surveillance — someone spying on you, tapping your calls, etc.;
Interrogation — someone making you answer questions, testify against yourself, etc.;
Aggregation — someone assembling dossiers or profiles about you;
Identification — someone tracking you from here to there, or making you do so yourself by carrying papers;
Insecurity — someone gaining illicit access to records legitimately kept about or for you;
Secondary use — someone taking records that were made for one purpose, and turning them to another purpose;
Exclusion — someone refusing to tell you what records are kept about you, or to correct mistakes;
Breach of confidentiality — someone leaking something that you told them in confidence;
Disclosure — someone leaking something that damages your reputation or your safety;
Exposure — someone intruding on you in activities that are conventionally private, such as defecation or grieving;
Increased accessibility — someone making it easier for others to get records about you that were hard to obtain before;
Blackmail — someone threatening to expose something about you in order to gain power over you;
Appropriation — someone using your image or name to promote a product or other goals;
Distortion — someone saying false or misleading things that hurt your reputation;
Intrusion — someone entering your home or private places without your consent;
Decisional interference — someone denying you information, or manipulating you, regarding personal matters such as sexuality and reproduction.
I was using it in the loose sense of “how much effort should I put into making it difficult to ascertain my real life identity.”
That is a very useful taxonomy, I may reference it in another project I’m working on analysing why people value privacy (and whether they should). The main motivation seems to be the ‘icky’ feeling people get at the thought of being observed, not any expected harms. Which means they are unwilling to accept small violations of privacy that would have massive social benefits (e.g. supplying police with all citizens fingerprints and DNA would massively reduce the number of unsolved crimes, with very minimal possibility for abuse).
This might be overselling it. Only about a quarter of criminal offences are recorded by the police, and they already solve some crimes despite incomplete fingerprint & DNA databases. So even if expanding the databases meant the police solved every crime they recorded, the number of unsolved crimes would fall by at most 20% (unless there were a reason to expect reporting/recording of crimes to rise as well).