I had to take some time to think about this. Thanks Cory for the prompt! I initially felt a bit squinky about tagging people to talk about privacy but I think @astepanovich @drkarenlord @marthawells1 might be interested and have interesting things to say, but no obligation!
https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1355622031958544384
Privacy is vitally important. Emotions, sense of self, and creativity all need sheltered places to grow and/or space to work themselves out where initial efforts don't (or minimally) affect others.
Those are, incidentally, all things that we don't put much emphasis on in a lot of societies these days, but they are important and in and of themselves should demonstrate that privacy is valuable.
But privacy is also personal and variable. Some people like to create in public! -but maybe they also need some private time to process. Some writers are happy drafting in public but need to edit in private, or vice versa.
To use a different example, in some times and places people feel/felt uncomfortable showing their bare heads in public; in other times and places it's entirely unremarkable. Some people are completely comfortable going topless in public; others find it excruciating.
I used bodies & clothing as an example because it's physical and clear, but the same happens in other ways too. I see it in my friend groups -semi-public- or #onhere -public- all the time: someone talks openly about something that I would hate to discuss, or the other way around.
and even for an individual person this can change over time, as they get older, have different experiences, or fall in with a culture or sub-culture that has different privacy standards and absorb them.
My point is that part of the difficulty in legislating &/or protecting privacy is that there is no absolute parameter for what privacy means. We can't draw a line saying that something is absolutely private or absolutely public; or
we can, but we can't expect it to be accurate for everyone's needs, always. & this risks, e.g., people in power deciding that women don't get to decide what they wear or don't wear, outlawing/forcing headcoverings or sending teenagers home from school to change their clothes.
But that doesn't mean we can't protect privacy. Instead of considering content absolutes, we have to think about structures of power. Who gets to decide what is private? How is that implemented - what is the accountability for privacy infringements?
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