Data for All

5 Privacy

This chapter covers

• The uniquely personal nature of privacy
• The definition of privacy and privacy in the context of history and society
• The difference between the need for privacy and the right to privacy
• Privacy as a basic human need
• Data privacy in relation to secrecy, trust, data ownership, human psychology, and technology

If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.¹ 

—IBM research engineer Emerson Pugh

Privacy has been a charged topic going back to ancient Greece. The US was the first country to expand Constitutional protection to citizen privacy in Supreme Court decisions under the first five and the 14th amendments.²  Privacy is a very personal topic for most people, ...