Previous: Introduction, Right to Privacy (part 1), (part 2), (part 3)

Outside of the important work to legally refine privacy and our freedoms for information, it is important to improve the sense of what privacy is in itself. If we have a good working notion of what is private and whose expectations are the most important in protecting and sharing private information, we should be able to rehabilitate privacy from its confrontational sense. Legal work needs this domain of privacy-as-discord to develop the concept publicly, but we can also improve the private sense of privacy. If what we regard as fundamentally private is information on our states of being, then describing it outside of any conflict is worthwhile pursuing.

[...]

Previous:  Introduction, Right to Privacy (part 1)

Confidential information can be generalized into isolated judgments or datum instead of long-term opinions or presumptions. The distinction is dependant upon how we highlight individual data points of people to be representative of themselves versus a private analysis of their behaviors or histories to predict their future decisions. We regard specific facts as confidential information that is kept by the individual to help form and abbreviate their identity. The analysis and further generalization of these facts is most often produced by organizations, which collect and predict the reactions people will have in their efforts to affirm some self-worth. Both types of confidential information contain judgments, but the point of interest for a right to privacy is that the proprietary studies of organizations who rely on the collection of private data of individuals maintain this information only for themselves. People always share, or can share their opinions and decisions, but the forecasted trends made from the confidential information of these judgments by organizations is disturbing when they are not accessible for inspection and corroboration.