Digital Privacy: A Fundamental Right or a Trade-Off for Security

Introduction

Digital privacy is a protection right for Internet users that guarantees their personal data safety while accessing online services. For this reason, digital privacy has become a pivotal concern in the modern age of technological advancements and data-driven society. While digital privacy is a trade-off for security due to the belief that both aspects are abstract categories, this concept is more of a fundamental right because it protects users’ data and does not depend on institutional trustworthiness.

Digital Privacy as a Security Trade-Off

Critics strongly argue that digital privacy is a trade-off for security more than a fundamental right because they believe that it is not a social practice but an abstract concept. The belief that digital privacy is a trade-off assumes that citizens will think that security outweighs privacy.¹ As such, the belief assumes that security and privacy are abstract categories and not social practices enacted from people’s interactions between them and their various social and institutional contexts. As a result, opponents contend that public security supersedes the right to safeguard one’s privacy in digital media due to the social aspects involved.

1. Sara Degli Esposti, Kirstie Ball, and Sally Dibb, “What’s in It for Us? Benevolence, National Security, and Digital Surveillance,” Public Administration Review 81, no. 5 (2021): 862, https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13362.

Digital Privacy: A Fundamental Right or a Trade-Off for Security

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Protection of Personal Data

One of the reasons why digital privacy is more of a fundamental right is because this concept has an important role in protecting the personal data of computer users, which is why it cannot be viewed as a trade-off for security. People’s digital footprints represent their attitudes, emotions, and behaviors since different types of sensitive information, such as their credit card records, tweets, and likes, are encompassed within the Internet.² In this regard, data privacy becomes crucial in protecting users’ information from identity theft, data breaches, and manipulative practices on the Internet. Hence, digital privacy is a fundamental right due to its heavy impact on protecting important user data.

2. Sandra C. Matz, Ruth E. Appel, and Michal Kosinski, “Privacy in the Age of Psychological Targeting,” Current Opinion in Psychology 31 (2020): 116, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.08.010.

Institutional Trustworthiness

Digital privacy is independent of institutional or government trustworthiness, unlike security trade-off, because citizens lack trust toward the government or organizations in which they work. For instance, citizens are reluctant to disclose personal data to their organizations due to privacy concerns, expected disclosure benefits, and privacy assurances.³ Basically, citizens and employees working in organizations do not fully trust many institutions to give up their personal information in the hope of security, and that is why data privacy being a trade-off for security is not easy to achieve. Therefore, data privacy is viewed as a trade-off since it is highly dependent on the trustworthiness of various institutions.

3. Ibrahim M. Al-Jabri, Mustafa I. Eid, and Amer Abed, “The Willingness to Disclose Personal Information,” Information & Computer Security 28, no. 2 (2019): 162, https://doi.org/10.1108/ics-01-2018-0012.

Conclusion

Digital privacy is more of a fundamental right than a trade-off for security because it plays an important role in protecting user data and is independent of the trustworthiness of some institutions or countries. Though some critics argue that citizens prefer security to privacy, it is worth noting that, even during the protection of citizens, their privacy is more crucial since revealing their personal data may expose them to danger in the future.

Bibliography

Al-Jabri, Ibrahim M., Mustafa I. Eid, and Amer Abed. “The Willingness to Disclose Personal Information.” Information &Computer Security 28, no. 2 (2019): 161–181. https://doi.org/10.1108/ics-01-2018-0012.

Esposti, Sara Degli, Kirstie Ball, and Sally Dibb. “What’s in It for Us? Benevolence, National Security, and Digital Surveillance.” Public Administration Review 81, no. 5 (2021): 862–873. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13362.

Matz, Sandra C., Ruth E. Appel, and Michal Kosinski. “Privacy in the Age of Psychological Targeting.” Current Opinion in Psychology 31 (2020): 116–121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.08.010.