Courtney Chan

Russell Hammersmith
Jun Takemoto
The Limits of Privacy Post 9/11
My personal concept of privacy is the embodiment of quite a few things. I believe
that privacy is a state of being alone or secluded because when youre by yourself that
is considered your private time in the context of American English. This sort of privacy is
cherished by many because more often than not people are constantly with other
people. This is through the scope of the American population; most people are always
collaborating and working together for their own personal advancement, but the idea of
privacy stems from being able to be alone or by yourself. I also think that privacy is the
protection of certain information, not necessarily from a legal perspective, but from a
personal perspective. To an extent all of your individual information should be private.
This information ranges from your social security number, drivers license number, or
anything sensitive that may require you to get a job to personal secrets or certain
information that you dont necessarily want everyone to know. I believe that everyone
has the right and ability to keep this sort of information private. Most personal
information can be kept private as long as you hold onto it internally, I think a lot of
people forget this in todays society. Since everyone is connected to the open internet a
lot of people end up sharing things about themselves without realizing. I think privacy in
this sense is important as long as people are aware of what they are sharing and to
whom. Certain organizations or potential employers rely on creating a trustworthy
relationship with an individual to protect their private information and respecting their
privacy.

My view is similar to that of The Limits of Privacy Book, that law enforcement
should be able to access information when its important, not all the time. There should
be a record of when and how they accessed your information made available to you
unless the investigation is ongoing. Accountability is key to balancing the responsibility
of having the ability of going through anyones information. What the government did in
terms of secret spying is unacceptable. When I heard the president say there is a
balance and that the public should be involved in the dialogue was very shocking
considering they had left the public out of the conversation completely. This just tells me
that there is much improvement to be made in some sort of checks and balances of
government surveillance practices.
I believe that everyone has the right to privacy to a certain extent. When pieces
of information have the idea of threatening someone or endangering someones safety,
the proper actions should be taken in order to ensure peoples safety. I also believe that
people have the right to anonymity, also to a certain extent. I believe that the
government should not be tracking personal information or their own good. The internet
should be open to all and should not have specific data influenced by each individual
online.
Our values of privacy are similar to those in American culture. Encryption,
personal identification documents, and medical information were all discussed in The
Limits of Privacy. Its important that personal information is private for each individual,
but possibly disclosed for public safety or personal benefits.
Several large businesses use encryption or hyper privacy in order to protect their
own confidential information from being hacked by competitors or governments of other

countries. Building these encryptions causes problems for America by not being able to
decipher other foreign encrypted messages. There have been several instances where
other countries have planning to attack America with these types of codes. In order for
public safety, the American government should be able to discover a way to figure out
others encryptions for the purpose of the countrys safety and health. Libertarians
believe that allowing the government this sort of access will lead to misuse of
confidential information. This is a high possibility, but in order for America to be safe,
drastic measures must be taken.
Personal identification documents are also necessary to prevent certain crimes
and also used for public safety. America now uses biometric identifiers, which makes
identification easier to use and more reliable. Some believe that it is just the
governments way to invade citizens privacy. There are several positive ways that these
documents can outweigh the cost to privacy. They can prevent several types of
crimes, such as child abuse, sex offenders, income tax fraud, fail to provide child
support, illegal gun sales, illegal immigration, welfare fraud, identity theft, and credit
card fraud. Even though using identification cards can violate rights to privacy, it is
important for investigators to figure out these types of events. These cards and
identification processes should be a minimal amount of intrusion and be reliable at the
same time.
Medical information for patients have similar issues to identification documents.
There have been several instances where authorities have misused or sold false
medical information. Large facilities have been using electronic storage in order to
protect the public, have a higher health quality, reduce costs, increase medical

research, and for public health. Citizens should self-regulate their own information in
case of different types of fraud. Employers and hospitals should only disclose medical
information for health care. Patients should know who has access to their confidential
information. Those who have misused these types of information should be punished.
Privacy is defined as a state of being alone, most Americans would extend this
definition to the protection of information. The values of the general public differ to what
they define privacy as. An example of this would be the age of information that we are
in. Using our current time period as how we can define privacy now, wed have two very
different sets of values. The first set is what was described earlier, but now since today
everyone is connected in one way or another, certain information becomes more
publically available. This can be credited to the social media culture that almost
everyone is taking a part of. Nothing is really private anymore as far as individual
information goes since everyone is posting everything online from their whereabouts to
what they eat every meal and even their personal feelings in the form of tweets. It
seems that people do care about privacy, but it is made apparent that the people who
do partake in posting on social media do not care about privacy as much as they claim
because of the fact that everything that is posted online is now publically available.
Next comes the idea of who exactly is to blame for certain things not being
private. Is it the persons fault for posting or the services fault for allowing access to the
public? This introduces the idea of accountability; most of the time it is the individuals
fault for allowing their private information to be publically available. On a positive note,
this information usually isnt an endangerment to someones well-being, but it is still
information an individual wouldnt want everyone in the world to have. This shift in the

sense of having certain information available to the public came with the introduction of
the internet; before there was crowd control as far as who knew what about you, but
now it is nigh impossible to control who knows what about you when you share things or
use popular services that a provided through the internet. Today, it seems that a lot of
people just dont care that certain information about them is publically available or that
corporations are using our user data to experiment or cater advertisements. This is a
huge shift in ideals from not too long ago, before almost every bit of personal
information was exactly what it sounded like; personal. Again, this seems to have been
lost from the generation of before the internet to todays generation.
Several similarities and differences are apparent in the cultures of privacy in
Russia and America. Russia has stricter rules in privacy compared to America, such as
the law signed earlier last year. Russian authorities claim that Internet threatens state
sovereignty. They believe that this leads to risk in national security. In order to void that
this year, Russia passed a law only allowing private information to be stored in their own
country. This law explains, Companies located outside Russia will be forced to place
their servers within Russia if they plan to continue making business in the market. Any
personal data in Russia includes recording, systematization, accumulation, storage,
revision, and extraction. If companies are to violate this law, they will be charged for
doing so. For example, Google broke this law by gathering information from Russian
citizens email data in order to create personalized advertisements. Citizens are starting
to wonder how this new law will affect social media websites on the Internet, such as
Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.

Russia also has a new AppProtex Cloud which allows data to be stored securely
in cloud applications. These Platforms allow enterprises and government agencies to
replace regulated or sensitive data with a token before it goes to the cloud. This will
give citizens and companies more privacy and protection within the country. Russians
also believe in face to face conversation more than relying on communication through
technology. Americas primary resources of communication include voice calls, digital
meetings, emails, texts, and other electronic forms. Russians dont believe in this way of
communication because it is not fully trustworthy. Even though America has strict laws
with privacy, Russia has been one of the first countries to pass such limiting privacy
laws. Americans feel that disclosing privacy can benefit the publics safety and
convenience, while Russia wants privacy and documents to be regulated for their own
country.
In China, privacy isnt very valued at all. It is the complete opposite of how
privacy is viewed here. The word for privacy in Chinese is yinsi, the characters that
make up the word mean illicit secrets and selfish which reflects how privacy is perceived
in Chinese culture. So the thought of having privacy seems like a very self-centered
idea. This notion of privacy in the Chinese culture is displayed in the everyday life of
China as well. The public bathrooms in China are usually just open like you would see
in maybe a jail cell, or conditions even worse where people are just squatting while
everyone is there to see. Even in the hospitals in China, the treatment that people
receive is completely open to see by everyone to see, unlike how it is in America where
you are taken to a private room to see a doctor. The article uploaded on The Economist
even states that

In the most casual of social interactions, complete strangers think nothing of

asking each other detailsabout their salary, weight and so onthat most
westerners would not share even with close friends.
In contrast to the American culture, these things are very private, but in China this
information is shared in casual conversations. Maybe in some instances this is good, for
example if people are searching for a significant other or life partner they may want to
know this information early on. Usually in American culture people dont find out these
things about other people until they are very close.
While the perception of privacy is very different in China than it is here in
America, it is not stagnant; privacy is changing and people are becoming more aware of
the concepts and idea of what privacy really is. The culture is slowly beginning to
change to gain more support for privacy in China. Since it is a growing concern among
the general public in China, new laws and regulations are slowly being put into place to
protect the privacy of the citizens. There are several laws in place that now protect
citizens data and give them privacy rights that they havent had before. Organizations
that collect personal electronic information must publish policies about how they handle
the user data, while individuals must also know about the purpose and method of how
their personal data is being collected. Another law in place is that individuals have to
give consent to have their information collected in the first place. The laws that are
being implemented are creating a shift in the culture for a more progressive
environment; most of the laws have to deal with electronic data, but once privacy
becomes more common online then it will translate to everyday life as well.

China is notorious for pre-installing malware in the devices that they put on the
market. The country has also been traced to several data breaches from big companies;
it always seems like the culprit behind large-scale hacks come from China. This is most
likely due to the culture and perception of privacy as well as how loosely it was
regulated in the past. The regulations on the information are issued by the Ministry of
Industry and Information and Technology, but they do not provide a definition of what
exactly is sensitive information. China is moving in the right direction, but the regulations
are still very loosely enforced. According to Lovells from iapp.org,
The Decision does not specify how individual consent to data practices should
be obtained, nor does it elaborate on the types of remedial measures that
organizations should take when personal information is compromised. And we
must wait to see what form the final version of the amendments to the consumer
protection law, as well as any associated regulations, will take.
Hopefully, in the future, the regulations in place will become more strict and specific in
order to cultivate a more protective and private environment. This change will probably
take several years in order to have a real impact because it seems like nothing has
changed in China throughout the recent years despite the regulations that the MIIT put
in place.
An interesting culture to compare to that of the US in terms of Internet Privacy is
that of Japan. While Japan has many similarities to US there are also both obvious and
subtle differences if we take a closer look. Considering privacy in general there is
traditionally a less individualist view, where they have more collectivist social values.
Some of these values can be attributed to strong Buddhist influence. While the religion

may not be practiced by all, considering oneself insignificant compared to the group as
a whole. Many Japanese also practice a religion called Shinto that influences their way
of life. In Shinto there is a respect for family, politeness and sustaining the culture of
Japan itself. It is the practice of these religious principles that gives the Japanese
culture its inherent respectfulness. While the Japanese did not have an original word for
privacy, and one had to be brought in as a loanword, they do have words for secret
and forbidden. Just because there was no specific word for privacy did not mean it
didnt exist. Many believe their concept of privacy to is linked to ..the traditional
Japanese lifestyle, where close proximity to family and neighbors has meant that things
observed or overheard inadvertently are not to be repeated or acknowledged in any
way and can be associated with the iconic Nikko monkeys and their famous message
of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil (Cullen).
Observations have been made that ..the perceived harm to a victim through
public embarrassment in North American culture is typically far less than in Japanese
culture. Plainly, cultural differences can affect perceived harm, and hence influence
organizational decision-making (Reay). This sense of privacy is carried all the way into
government in the case of Japan. The Japanese Constitution declares privacy not only
in the home, but in communication, seen here in article 25. Except in the cases
mentioned in the law, the secrecy of the letters of every Japanese subject shall remain
inviolate (Adams). In 2002 the Japanese government commissioned a single national
database system containing the names, address and various other details of all 120
million citizens and long-term residents of Japan (Adams). In response to mass
concern over the security of the national database, the government responded in 2003

with the first set of regulations over governmental and private use of personal
information. These laws were updated in 2014 to include biometric information such as
fingerprint data and face recognition. Sensitive information such as an individuals race,
creed, religion and criminal record will also be protected. A new authority was
established to enforce the privacy policies, with more power than the ministries it
oversees.
Privacy can be defined many ways. Whether one is concerned with protecting
sensitive information or simply seeking solitude, it should be within their ability to do so.
Nowadays the Internet surely doesnt seem to help us protect our privacy. People are
constantly oversharing on social media and data is regularly stolen in mega breaches.
What can be done is regulating the way information is accessed and stored by
governments and corporations. By looking at some other nations, we can easily see the
benefit or liability caused by shifting our countrys stance in either direction. From a
country like Japan, whose long standing traditions of privacy have influenced its laws
earlier than most countries; to China who has such a different view of privacy, that they
constantly hack into other countries to violate privacy everywhere. After 9/11 the US
made a shift to secretly collect data. Some say the policy is outrageous and completely
disagree with it. Others feel that in order to protect the citizens of our country the
surrender of some privacy is necessary. Our position is that of a balanced approach,
where the government is allowed access to any and all information when necessary. To
prove there is a need the law enforcement and intelligence agencies must get
permission from joint oversight, and provide transparency. When transparency poses an
immediate threat to security, the documentation of access history must be made public

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eventually. There should also be transparency when corporations and caregivers share
information collected from us. With these safety nets in place our country will be safer
and also nurture an atmosphere of privacy.

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