Privacy: Defending an Illusion

Citation

Fourie, I. (2013), "Privacy: Defending an Illusion", Online Information Review, Vol. 37 No. 4, pp. 666-667. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-05-2013-0121

With global access to information, new developments in IT and the increasing use of surveillance technology, privacy is an important concern in various arenas. Policymakers and legislators, as well as those who reflect on the academic issues of privacy, face increased pressure to address the challenges.

Martin Dowding's Privacy: Defending an Illusion fills a gap in the literature by reflecting on the complexities of privacy, which might seem straightforward at first glance. Dowding succeeds in helping his readers have a wider understanding of the issues by portraying the views expressed by various experts, ranging from “You have zero privacy anyway… get over it” (p. v) to questions about whether “…people today think privacy is not as necessary in the way it was once thought to be necessary” (p. v), to his own observation that it is not always acknowledged that many people still believe that there is an ethical, moral, political and common sense case for privacy.

Following an introduction, Dowding begins by reviewing (Chapter 1) a number of historical implications of privacy in various social‐cultural circumstances, taking the reader back to mediaeval life and the common practice of nobles to have huge beds they shared with a wife, children and even servants in the “dead of winter” (p. 4). This is followed by eight more chapters addressing how developments in ICTs have changed conceptions of privacy. These chapters deal with the issues of privacy from space to cyberspace, the contrast between pre‐ICT privacy and today's ICT realities, the question of whether ICT creates a new social norm, the illusionary protection of privacy legislation and policy, privacy in the workplace, privacy in health, and social networking and Facebook. In the concluding chapter the author ponders whether privacy has a future. Eight appendices supporting the text, as well as a list of further reading, are included. One appendix provides a list of useful web addresses for the Electronic Privacy Center and Fellow Petitioners to the Federal Petitioners to the Federal Trade Commission (US).

In general people today exhibit a tendency to share much more information than would have been so a decade ago, and this has many unforeseen implications. Privacy issues ranges from being searched by a complete stranger at an airport to landlords entering apartments, with four types of privacy being distinguished: information privacy, bodily privacy, privacy of communication and territorial privacy.

Privacy: Defending an Illusion is aimed at senior undergraduate and early postgraduate students. It is recommended as a useful text that can be used with another recent publication, Privacy in America: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Scarecrow Press, 2011), which focuses more on factual matters of importance.