When you purchase an airline ticket, you disclose personal information. When you check into a hotel, the front desk officer gets to read a lot about you. When you enroll in school, apply for a job, or fill in a job application form, you disclose so much about yourself. Now, recall all those transactions that required you to fill in blanks that asked about anything—from your home address, to your parents’ names, to your mobile phone number, to your credit card number and its security code—and you start to shiver at the thought of how much personal data is floating around somewhere, how much information you have disclosed about yourself has been processed and is in the hands of others. You can keep your window shutters tightly shut and your doors doubly locked. You can use heavy draperies or tint your windows heavily—but privacy will just be an illusion, given all that you have already disclosed.
And you start to shiver and quake even more when you read about how dreadful phishing can be, and that cracking and hacking can bring about your financial ruin, and identity theft make a mess of your life and all but wreck your future! And yet, The Data Privacy Act of 2012 (Republic Act No. 10173) remains unsung and unheralded. In their haste with getting things done, people hurriedly answer questions that elicit personal data— whether orally or in writing and seldom, if ever, does it occur to them that the information, in the wrong hands, could result in bank accounts bled dry or unwanted transactions bringing one to the brink of penury.
The law does two things: It legislates the guarantee of privacy in respect to information about oneself that one discloses but it also provides for the legitimate processing, handling and storing of information. Audiatur et altera pars…let the other side be heard. We do need information—about others. It is because national and transnational intelligence agencies keep databases and profiles that terrorists are ferreted out and apprehended before they can unleash their maniacal force. Thanks to police data and fingerprint files (more and more replaced by biometrics) cases may still take time to solve but do not so easily turn cold any longer. So privacy cannot and should not mean the exclusion of all data-gathering.
One key guarantee of the law is that the data-subject is given intelligible information about the purpose that he is asked for data about himself, that the purpose be legitimate and that the data obtained be limited to what is necessary for the fulfillment of such a legitimate purpose. As important is the requirement that it imposes on handlers of data (think banks, universities, hospitals, employers, etc.) to keep the data confidential and to disallow the free exchange of transmission of personal information.
Earlier than this law, however, the Supreme Court promulgated a rule that institutionalized the writ of habeas data. A person who believes his life, liberty and security to be compromised by information that others have about him, keep and maintain—whether these individuals be agents of the State or not—may seek the privilege of the writ that will give the aggrieved party access to the threatening data, or cause the destruction, modification or correction of data already amassed.
But while we can be very assertive about the right to privacy, the public-ness by which we live our lives—largely through social media—does raise the question whether or not privacy is such a precious commodity after all! Facebook is a free source of information on so many details of other people’s lives who do not seem to mind going public about such minutiae as the things they eat, and the thrills of dates, and even the movements of the bedroom calisthenics in which they engage! One Supreme Court case put it very well: When a person goes on Facebook, even when she sets privacy at “friends only”— one of the most restrictive of settings—such a person has a greatly diminished (if not inexistent) expectation of privacy—precisely because of the nature of the medium and the fact that not even Trump can put up walls in cyberspace!
Why should we be private anyway? There are, philosophers think, some “irreducibles”. Colors are irreducible in the sense that you cannot talk about yellow by using other colors or hues. Shame is one such feeling, and the compulsion to privacy comes with it. It is, in other words, a concomitant of subjectivity. And indeed it has everything to do with one’s sense of worth! What can be said then of an era that claims so much in the name of privacy, but also exposes more of private space to an often anonymous public?