Jacob Bacharach recently reflected on the way many authority figures construe privacy in the age of the Internet:
Educators and employers are constantly yelling that you young people have an affirmative responsibility not to post anything where a teacher or principal or, worst of all, boss or potential boss might find it, which gets the ethics of the situation precisely backwards. It isn’t your sister’s obligation to hide her diary; it’s yours not to read it. Your boyfriend shouldn’t have to close all his browser windows and hide his cell phone; you ought to refrain from checking his history and reading his texts. But, says the Director of Human Resources and the Career Counselor, social media is public; you’re putting it out there. Yes, well, then I’m sure you won’t mind if I join you guys at happy hour with this flip-cam and a stenographer. Privacy isn’t the responsibility of individuals to squirrel away secrets; it’s the decency of individuals to leave other’s lives alone.
Douthat responds with a more modest understanding of privacy:
A truly moral person, a truly moral corporation, and a truly moral government would not exploit the kind of information that people now share with one another on the internet. But it is not sufficient to simply say, with Bacharach and many others who have come of age with the internet, that privacy is “the decency … to leave other’s lives alone,” and demand that the world and all its powers live up to that ideal. Privacy is also the wisdom to recognize that not all peers and powers are actually decent, and that one’s exposure should perhaps be limited accordingly. And it’s precisely because the ease and convenience of internet communication inclines us all (myself included) to forget or compromise this wisdom — or else pretend to we’re abandoning it out of some higher commitment to honesty and openness — that I expect us to make our peace with the surveillance state, now and for many years to come.
The Dish 