Next SectionParty Rights and Duties
First party - individual. Each individual has a right to some degree of privacy in some areas of his or her life. Alan Westin referred to this kind of privacy as solitude: "the individual is separated from the group and freed from observation of other persons." (Westin, p.31). The concept of privacy places a limit on the flow of personal information and channels it. It endows each individual with the right to stop, restrict, or otherwise control the flow of his or her personal information. The right to privacy, however, is only a partial right, not an absolute one. As a result, any attendant duty to confidentially is also partial. Under certain conditions pledges of confidentiality may be breached.
Rights also entail responsibilities. Each individual also has a responsibility to assert their right to privacy and to take reasonable precautions to assure it. A person must be active, not passive in protecting his or her rights. For example, given the current state of surveillance technologies taking precautions such as locking one's doors and putting up blinds, etc., perhaps even using jamming devices, becomes the responsibility of the individual. It is an irony that the more popular or famous an individual becomes - that is, the more a person becomes a celebrity - the greater the responsibility that a person must assume to provide for his or her own privacy. Secrecy is one of the tools a person uses to protect his or her privacy. Various technologies exist today to help keep things secret. Nevertheless, it is also the responsibility of the fourth party to establish laws, policies and enforcement procedures so as to minimize the effects of unwanted surveillance on its citizens. In general, however, the permissible zones of privacy in a society are rooted deeply in a society's culture, its norms and its special geopolitical circumstances.
Second party. The second party has a duty of confidentiality and secrecy. A fiduciary relationship is established in which personal information is entrusted by the first party to the second party. This information becomes privileged. Privilege in this context refers to the right of the first party to impose on the second party a duty to refuse to answer any questions posed by any third parties relating to the information that passed between them. Furthermore, it should not be transferred or sold to others without consent. Therefore the second party must take the steps necessary to secure the personal information in such a way that it does not leak to any member of the third party. Each of us deals with many different types of second parties. A second party may be an individual and the form of privacy protection may be as simple as a promise not to tell. The second party frequently, however, is an institution, a company, a group or, in general, a decision structure. In this case privacy protection takes on a more complex form. Decision structures and some of their requirements are discussed more detail below.
Third party. The third party has a duty of restraint. It should honor the first party's rights of privacy and privilege and the second party's duty of confidentiality. Decorum requires that third parties should not probe too deeply into the private lives of other members of the society. As will be discussed below, the modem information society has been witness to an erosion of restraint and decorum with respect to personal information. Many third parties have become, at best, economic opportunists or, at worst, electronic voyeurs. Instilling in society values with respect to privacy is an important education and acculturation issue.
Fourth party. The fourth party has a duty to acquire only that information it needs to perform its social function and to make public only that personal information that should legitimately be made available to all members of the society.
This general framework for considering privacy in our society is shaped by two historical forces: (1) the Western intellectual tradition, and (2) technology, especially the technologies resulting in the electronically networked, digital, information society.