The Internet and privacy

Abstract

There has been much discussion, over the last few years, about the impact of the widespread use of computers on people’s privacy. The rapid growth of the Internet as a tool of trade, research, and entertainment, has only served to intensify that discussion. Much of the discussion of privacy on the Internet has focussed on legal conceptions of what the right to privacy might entail, and thus deals primarily with the issue of what legal protection users of the Internet (particularly American users of the Internet) might be entitled to. Such an approach seems to me to be somewhat wrong-headed, and so in this paper I want to look at this problem in a different way. I hope to achieve three main aims: (1) to highlight the problems involved in discussing an essentially philosophical question within a legal framework, and thus to show that providing purely legal answers to an ethical question is an inadequate approach to the problem of privacy on the Internet; (2) to discuss what privacy in the medium of the Internet actually is; and finally (3) to attempt to apply a globally acceptable ethical approach to the problem of privacy on the Internet, and thus to answer the question of what is and is not morally permissible in this area.