Oxford professor of Philosophy and Ethics, Luciano Floridi, outlines 4 different types of privacy relating to information. Below is a summary of those four as well as how they relate to the social media platform Facebook.
Decisional Privacy:
Floridi outlines Decisional Privacy as the right to the privacy of your own decisions. By this he means that you should have the freedom to make your own decisions without the interference of others regardless of who they are. Whilst this does not cover others voicing their opinions about your decisions whether or not you take those opinions to heart is at your own discretion. Facebook can be seen as a breeding ground for users of various opinions to share their opinions, however many of them will fight against those who do not share their opinions to the point of harassment. This can violate one’s decisional privacy as harassment can lead to the influence of one’s decisions which decisional privacy strives to protect.
Mental Privacy:
Mental Privacy involves the sacred space of one’s own mind. This type of privacy concerns the tampering and manipulation of your own thoughts for someone else’s benefit. This includes having information planted into your head through suggestion or hypnotism as well as having your information sampled from your mind against your will through means of lie detection tests, hypnotism and even MRI scans. Facebook is an app that has a high user count and commonly shows ads and promotions which subconsciously plant suggestions to buy products. This can be seen as a breach of mental privacy as many see Facebook as a safe haven to escape from the hoards of corporate advertisers.
Informational Privacy:
Informational Privacy governs the privacy of the personal information you have saved as data online or on your computer. Informational Privacy is the topic of heated debates about the practices of online systems such as Google analytics that sample your information and use it to cater your web browsing experience to you. Useful as this may be it can be abused and manipulated to give others access to your personal and private information. Seen in the picture below is the section in Facebook’s privacy policy on how your information is collected and how it can be used. You can see this includes your personal information, your messages with other users and even your billing information which includes banking details. This is seen by many as a massive breach of privacy having their personal information so vulnerable to hackers.
Physical Privacy:
Physical Privacy can be seen as the most ‘real’ type of privacy as it concerns your physical person. It involves protection from being recorded through cameras or voice recording devices and can cover location services on mobile devices as well. Many companies use this location data for their own good and many believe our own devices violate this with concerns of webcam and camera hacking. When using Facebook on mobile they ask for permission to use your location and GPS data in order to cater recommendations and reviews to the are around you. As helpful as this is a hacker could potentially use this information to find where you are and use this information for their own benefits putting you physically at risk as a result of a digital service.
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