What is "Privacy"?

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Hello, everyone. And welcome to our very first module the history of the C C. P. A.

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A quick programming note. This is where we are in our course outline.

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During this module, we will be exploring together the major events and trends that made the CCP a possible the idea of being If we better understand why the CCP a even passed in the first place, we will, by extension, better understand the specific privacy obligations that are contained within the law itself.

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Ah, very first lesson in the entire course needs to be dedicated to the most central question of all.

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What is privacy?

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I'll tell you now, the answer to this question has shifted dramatically over time, and it even varies greatly depending upon where you are in the world.

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Despite all those variances, there actually are some basic concepts that you'll see no matter where you are.

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Are learning goals and objectives for less than 1.1 will be to review these basic concepts and see how they've developed over time.

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Once we reviewed these concepts, a second goal would be to categorize them into two separate buckets. Legal understandings of privacy and cultural understandings of privacy.

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Okay,

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so let's kick this conversation off by me asking you this very question.

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Please take a second to really think about it.

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What does privacy mean to you?

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Better yet,

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if you were to utter the phrase

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please respect my privacy,

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what does that actually mean?

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What are you trying to communicate?

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This is by no means official, but

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in essence you are communicating one of the six concepts appearing on your screen. Now

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let's start on the left.

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One of the oldest privacy concepts dating well back to the age of the ancient Greek philosophers who, by the way, debated this very subject for years is the idea that sometimes you just have the right to be left alone,

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not every waking moment of your day. And certainly not every detail of your personal life is the business of other people.

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Could you imagine if you went up to a stranger and asked, Excuse me? How many times have you used the bathroom? Today?

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There are just sometimes when cultural norms dictate that people should just be left alone.

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This blends well into human dignity as a privacy concept.

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Let's think about that word for a moment

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dignity.

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There are certain pieces of information about individuals that should not be shared,

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and if they are, it is considered an affront to their dignity or their worth as an individual

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moving on to the third item here.

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Believe it or not,

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intimacy is actually one of the oldest privacy concepts to ever be written down.

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In fact, if you've ever heard of the concept of carnal knowledge, that phrase refers to an individual knowing private information about another individual. Usually, of course, by being intimate with that person.

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Another fun fact.

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Religious texts across a variety of cultures and faiths also include bedroom relations at the time between the husband and wife as being private, which historically was one of the first times we ever saw a group of humans putting down a privacy concept into writing

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personal freedom.

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Item number four. Here

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it's less discussed, but it's equally important.

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This refers to the idea that individuals should have a right to move freely from location to location,

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pursue a different career what have you. But

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none of that can be done unless the information about you can, as appropriate, remain private and by extension, in your past.

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The last two concepts are much more modern and legal in nature.

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Control basically comes down to this.

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Your personal information belongs to you, and therefore you should be able to control what is done with that information, who that information is shared with and how long the third party should be entitled to hold on to that information.

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Privacy, viewed through the lens of control, is very in vogue, and it grows in importance with each passing year.

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The last one here,

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noticing transparency, is obviously an invention of the modern era.

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Here's the punchline.

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Businesses who collect your information should be required to inform you of what they will do with that information, what that internal business practices and how they're organized.

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All of that should not be a secret.

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Without those protections,

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your privacy cannot be fully guaranteed.

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I'd love to know what you think is most important here.

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Feel free to pause the video. Ask a friend or someone around you. Or better yet, send me an email with your thoughts on which one of these is the most important.

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I truly believe you can make a case for all six of these.

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The CCP a exists at the intersection of cultural and legal privacy

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in one way or the other, it addresses all of those six privacy concepts we just reviewed,

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either specifically in one section of the law. And by the way, I will point that out for you when that happens,

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or spiritually in some other manner, where the laws are either designed to enforce or perhaps designed to incentivize businesses to behave in a certain way.

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The main point here is that if you look at specific code sections of the C C p A and build a privacy program around just that,

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you're gonna miss a lot of the privacy concepts that regulators and consumers alike expect.

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Before we close out this conversation on the history of privacy, it's important that we take a recent look at all the major events that have happened in the last 60 years. 70 years

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during the 19 fifties, three United States was locked in a global power struggle against the Soviet Union that saw, for the first time ever, the mass collection of personal information and national scale espionage.

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That experience left a permanent imprint on the American psyche and in many ways our legal system today, especially as it relates to privacy, exists in the shadows of those very trying times.

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Equally important,

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during the 19 eighties, companies suddenly began to go digital.

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This year, volume of information they collected nearly exploded overnight.

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This trend, of course, continues to this day, and in many regards, ah, host of businesses and industries have yet to wake up to realize the sheer amount of personal information that they are collecting.

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Hence, of course,

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the reason for regulation like the C c. P. A.

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Like many things in life, privacy is still very much so in the reactionary environment. We will only act if the fire alarm is blaring. But that alarm has actually been blaring for the better part of a decade.

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Massive data breaches are highlighting to consumers that companies first off collect way more information about them than they initially realized, and secondly, that they're not always keeping that information secure.

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Lastly, the C c p. A would not exist had it not been for the g. D. P. R.

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For those of you who haven't heard of the General data protection regulation before, long story short, it's Europe's main privacy law

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we will discuss the GDP are on occasion in this course. But the main take away here is that US based businesses change their practices to adjust for the GDP are.

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And that basically gave American privacy advocates the green light to say, Well, hey,

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why not us?

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As a closing thought,

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I also think it's very important to note that technology is developing at a much faster rate than our legal frameworks can keep up with.

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You need look no further, for example, that the consequences of facial recognition technology in Hong Kong

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to see why people are scared of where technology is going.

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The C, C, p A. And for that matter, other privacy laws are viewed as an antidote to where technology might take us.

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In summary, we've identified three different concepts here today. In the very first lesson.

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First,

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privacy is not just a field of law or compliance, but rather something that humans have desired for millennia.

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It's also not something that should be understood strictly through the lens of legal or compliance or a cultural understanding of privacy, but rather

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both

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And the c C P. A exists at that intersection of both of those.

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Of course, consumers and regulators alike have a growing expectation of privacy, and that has become particularly true in the last 70 or so years.