I can't afford a nice long vacation this summer, so a few short get-aways have become the substitute--and the conclusion of one get-away lodged itself in my conscience. I hope this post can help me work through it.
As I was checking out of my hotel, standing at the front desk signing paperwork, I overheard a local police officer ask the manager for a list of all the guests staying in the hotel for the upcoming week. The manager politely told the officer that she couldn't do that. The officer kept asking. The manager kept politely refusing. Once I signed the bill and sealed the maid's tip in an envelope, I felt like I should go.
This is why I'm writing this post. I felt like I should have said something, but I had little authority in this situation. As someone fascinated with privacy in our society (how we imagine it, define it, use it, abuse it, trade it, etc.) I wanted to offer my opinion. But what exactly was my opinion? My gut told me to tell the manager to stand her ground--that those guests had entered into a private business transaction with her hotel, and she had an obligation to those customers to protect their privacy. From another perspective, the hotel is in control of the names in its registry; is it much different from an old-fashioned registry on a counter? Perhaps it has the right to decide what it does with those names. Furthermore, if there truly is a security issue, perhaps the hotel has an obligation to the community to assist the police? But what evidence did the office have to show that the public safety or security was at risk and that this action was critical to protecting that? Then again, if there is a crime being investigated, perhaps the police can simply get a warrant for this information? Again, though, my interest in privacy is that of the amateur academic.
In the book Understanding Privacy, author Daniel Solove argues that privacy should not be conceptualized as the "individual" versus the "collective." He argues that privacy exists precisely because the collective recognizes the benefits and importance of privacy. Solove uses that point to argue that, therefore, we should conceptualize privacy differently: as a set of "protections against a plurality of distinct but related problems...information collection...information processing...information dissemination...invasion." Solove argues that this is a rhetorical shift away from trying to come to a common definition of privacy, with an agreed upon boundary, into which an issue must distinctly fall inside or outside. Instead, we are now free to talk about problems. And, yes, we still get to discuss whether a specific situation in the real world would be a privacy problem or not, but as Solove claims, this allows us to focus on what makes something a problem: harms (who or what was harmed? in what ways? to what degree? etc.)
For me, what I appreciate most from Solove's book is that in its closing pages he shows that this conceptualization of privacy is good for addressing systemic harms. He shows that, to a fault, U.S. law asks individuals to provide concrete evidence of injury regarding privacy issues. He suggests that that procedure allows too many important privacy problems to be ignored on the basis of receipts of payments made to a therapist (or lack thereof). Conversely, his conceptualization of privacy allows the courts (and legislatures) to consider how ways of life, behaviors, systems of interaction at the individual, group, and societal level are harmed in ways that are subtle, yet critically relevant and important.
In my gut, what I overheard at that hotel makes me conflicted. It seems that the cops were trying to catch criminals. That's good. As for me? I was checking out; I can't show injury. That's good, too. And, the upcoming guests of that hotel--if their names or other information were turned over to that officer were they all going to be rounded up and interrogated? No. So, can they show injury? But, and this is where Solove comes in, would something have been harmed if the hotel turned over all of those names? In my opinion, yes. The trust we place in a business transaction, the upfront way in which we fight crime, the balance we, as citizens, seem to feel between the ideas of "the long arm of the law" and our "that's-none-of-your-business" attitude--all of those realities become, to a degree, harmed by an act like this.
The other irony here, is perhaps too obvious. If the officer and the manager had only spoken privately. . .
There's humor in that, no?
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