What is the definition of privacy? (02:09)

What is the definition of privacy?

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Hi there! Welcome to the first lesson of this course. Let’s clear some things up first by defining what privacy actually is. There are actually a lot of different forms of privacy. For example: You have ‘physical privacy’; where you might not really care if a doctor sees you naked, but you do care if it’s your neighbour creeping at you with a telescope. You have ‘space privacy’, where you determine your behaviour based on where you are. You might want to sing out loud in your own shower, but you don’t actually want to do that while sitting in a bus. And you have another form called ‘relationship privacy’, that is mostly based on the trust you have in different people or company’s in your life. Maybe you’re dating someone you’re not willing to share your bed with on the first date, but you do trust this person more on the third date.

We are going to focus ourselves on ‘information privacy’. This type of privacy is mostly focussed on the data that is passing from you to all the different instances and companies that you are communicating with online. ‘Information privaçy’ has a strong connection with ‘relationship privacy’, because your wishes on sharing your information might change if the CEO of a company changes, or the policital party in power of your country changes. The question then becomes: do you still trust the new CEO or political party? Or what if your goverments behaviour changes and starts acting in ways that you might consider tyrannical? All that shines the light on a couple of new questions like: should privacy-focussed platforms and services have centralized structures? And should privacy focussed platforms always have transparency in their coding i.e. be open source. These questions, and more, will be answered in the rest of lesson one. In the next lesson we will first discuss the privacy paradox: Why do so many people care about privacy, but yet don’t seem to take action? I’ll see you there.

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