Personal Privacy in the Age of the Internet: The Influence of Information and Communication Technologies on Personal Privacy

For two decades now, the issue of privacy has been in the focus of public attention. Again and again, we hear news of violations of cyber privacy. The current state of events makes more and more individuals and authorities realize the urgent need for regularization and regulation in the field of privacy (or what remains of it). However, a number of questions remain unclear: What is privacy as a concept? Where and to what does it apply? Where does the private sphere end and the public sphere begin? Where does privacy stand in relation to other concepts such as freedom, autonomy and liberty? How to balance individual rights against the public’s right to know? And how should it all be regulated in this age of information and communication technologies which follow us wherever we go and whatever we do?
Many attempts have been made to redefine personal privacy, but what Yair Oppenheim is doing in this book is use all those various attempted definitions to extract the basic components of privacy. Based on that, he proposes to divide privacy into two distinct categories – deep personal privacy and general personal privacy – and to replace the discussion of personal privacy with discussion of deep and general personal privacy information, allowing to draw a clear line around deep personal privacy in the discussion of the influence of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on personal privacy as a whole.
The main argument made by this book is that until the age of ICTs, deep personal privacy had been inaccessible, and therefore had never been culture dependent – unlike general personal privacy, which has always been culture-dependent. This distinction allows us to see that while ICTs are affecting both types of privacy, threatening to expose them and make them public, the greatest change in this area is that ICTs allow – for the first time in history – the exposure of deep personal privacy, which is a fundamental human need vital to the existence of individuals, but no less vital to the existence of society.
Dr. Yair Oppenheim holds several degrees in mathematics, computer science, business and cyber security, and a Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University’s Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas. For many years, he managed IT and information systems for multinational corporations including Delta-Galil, GE Healthcare, Teva Pharmaceuticals, and others.