Privacy in Public

Privacy in Public-

It is sometimes believed that privacy is a right that people have when they are in private places like homes, private clubs and restrooms, but that is minimized or forfeited as soon as they enter public space. When you walk in public streets or are on the road with your car, it is sometimes believed, you may retain the right not to be seized and searched without probable

cause, but your appearance and behavior may be freely observed, surveilled and registered. Many privacy scholars, however, have argued that this position is not wholly tenable, and that people have privacy rights in public areas that are incompatible with certain registration and surveillance practices. The problem of privacy in public applies to the tracking, recording, and

surveillance of public appearances, movements and behaviors by individuals and their vehicles. Techniques that are used for this including video surveillance (CCTV), including smart CCTV for facial recognition, infrared cameras, satellite surveillance, GPS tracking, RFID tagging, electronic checkpoints, mobile phone tracking, audio bugging, and ambient intelligence techniques. Does the use of these techniques violate privacy even when they are used in public places? The problem of privacy in public also applies to publicly available information on the Internet. Does the fact that personal information is available on a public forum make it all right to harvest this information, aggregate it and use it for specific purposes?

Helen Nissenbaum has argued in an influential paper that surveillance in public places that involves the electronic collection, storage and analysis of information on a large scale often amounts to a violation of personal privacy. She argues that people often experience such surveillance as an invasion of their privacy if they are properly informed about it, and that such electronic harvesting of information is very different from ordinary observation, because it shifts information from one context to another and frequently involves record merging and matching and data mining. She concludes that surveillance in public places violates privacy whenever it violates contextual integrity: the trust that people have that acquired information appropriate to one context will not be used in other contexts for which it was not intended