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As private as it is, data privacy is a public good
With interdependent relations, even the most careful, educated and responsible individuals still rely on others for their data privacy.
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Security first: Figurines stand around a smartphone, whose back is opened, in a photo studio in Paris on July 23, 2021 to raise the issue of personal-data protection in this fast-growing digital era. (AFP/Joel Saget)
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n September 2022 the communication and informatics minister made the headlines when he responded to a series of data breaches by telling people to change their passwords regularly. He also advised people against sharing their personal information carelessly.
The comments were among the many instances of how the government's approach toward data-privacy protection heavily focuses on individual responsibility.
This approach overlooks one crucial thing: if internet interactions are interconnected, why is digital privacy any different? The interconnectedness and externalities of these interactions make one's privacy very much dependent on others.
In her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff refers to the belief that privacy is private as "the most treacherous hallucination of them all".
Some scholars have argued that privacy, given its interconnected nature, should be treated as a public good, in which protection requires collective efforts. According to Norwegian political scientist Henrik Skaug Sætra, privacy is an aggregate good whose availability "depends on the combined and sustained actions of most individuals".
Similarly, in 2016, German scholars Matzner et al. also insisted that data protection "must be seen as a social responsibility and not as an individual problem". They suggested that everyone was responsible for protecting the data they provided and used because those data could affect and invade the privacy of others.
There are at least two main reasons privacy should be categorized as a public good. First, it is a chain reaction, where information about us could also be about other people. Law scholars Joshua A. T. Fairfield and Christoph Engel described it well in their 2015 article: "Your privacy is not yours alone. The data that a person produces concerns both herself and others. Being cautious with personal data is, therefore, not enough. Individuals are vulnerable merely because others have been careless with their data.” In short, one's decision to share their own data could also impact other people's privacy.
