Is Your Privacy Endangered?
By Awake! correspondent in Japan
A WELL-KNOWN Japanese comedian and 11 followers stormed into a publishing firm. Wielding fire extinguishers and umbrellas, they injured five men. The reason for the raid? He claims his privacy had been violated by the company’s photo magazine.
Magazines that thrive on invading people’s privacy have proliferated in Japan. “Young cameramen do not hesitate to trample on other people’s privacy, and the editorial staff praise them as ‘courageous,’” says a free-lance photographer.
The proliferation of computers also increases the threat to privacy. U.S. government agencies reportedly have 18 to 20 files on the average American, and many persons have legitimate access to such files. Yet, others, called hackers, are known to intrude into these files.
Illustrating this is the report in The Times of London about a 22-year-old hacker who broke into the secret computer files of the Duke of Edinburgh and left messages. A hacker also succeeded in entering a word processor of the Israeli foreign minister and colored a speech manuscript with humorous lines.
Not only do celebrities feel the threat but ordinary citizens also do. According to a 1983 poll taken in the United States, 77 percent of those surveyed expressed concern over threats to their privacy. The Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende reports: “Fifty percent of all Danes feel unsafe or very unsafe about the way in which private and public files are used.” And in Japan, where the right to privacy has been less honored, many are worried and fear that invasion of privacy will increase.
True, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences says that the automation of personal information need not interfere with the continued enjoyment of individual rights. Nevertheless, many people fear a Big Brother society as depicted in George Orwell’s novel 1984.
But there is another aspect to the subject besides the one that involves computers and the right to control information concerning oneself. Masao Matsumura of the Management and Coordination Agency in Japan describes it as “the traditional aspect of privacy, the right to be let alone.”
Today, even this “traditional aspect” is endangered. You may have had the experience of wanting “to be let alone” and yet had others prey on your privacy. How do you view your privacy? Do you believe it should be guarded jealously at the expense of most other things? First, however, let us consider just what is meant by privacy.
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The problem of privacy becomes more complex with the advance of information technology