Privacy, confidentiality, anonymity, discretion, deceit, paranoia. Part 2

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc/LMMiami.com

“Never do or say anything you wouldn’t do or say in front of your kids.”

• I know, it is not 100% enforceable.
• But you get the point.
• If you need “privacy” to do or say something, well, maybe you shouldn’t.
• To use another cliché: sunlight is the best disinfectant.
• Nevertheless, we tend to bandy about the word privacy as a catchall antidote to any number of alleged threats to our freedom, our property and our way of life.
• Why?
• A generous dose of transparency would remove most, if not all, the friction and aggravation of, say, negotiating a salary raise or the price of a new car.
• That annoying suspicion that you’ve been taken to the cleaners when you drive away at the wheel of your new SUV.
• That nagging feeling that you left money on the table.
• We must stop using “privacy” as a sugarcoated synonym of “deception”.
• If your business model is based on misleading or withholding information from your clients/customers, well, you are not a successful business person: you are a swindler and your business is a con.
• It is a pervasive semantics problem, if you ask me.
• More often than not we use privacy as a misnomer, a euphemism.
• Deliberately or not, we confuse privacy with opacity, secrecy, confidentiality or anonymity.
• Safeguarding intellectual property, for instance, is not about “privacy”.
• Namely Coca-Cola’s “secret formula”.
• Or the “secret sauce” of myriad pharmaceutical products.
• It is about property rights.
• Conversely, as a consumer, I want to know exactly what I’m putting into my body, even if the FDA approved it.
• The fact that purveyors of goods and services are forced to keep their intellectual property under a mantle of secrecy to protect it from thieves is not about privacy: it is about moral hazards.
• By the way, your ATM secret password is not privacy, it’s safety.
• However, if you hide your political opinions, ethnicity or sexual orientation from your coworkers or superiors under the belief that disclosure would be a stigma that might sabotage your career, well, you are a bit of an accomplice.
• A collaborationist.
• Unfortunately, life requires a little courage sometimes.
• A little example: I’d have a brand new Ducati Hypermotard 950 SP parked in my garage if I had a penny for every time I’ve been told that naming my company López Martí Miami sounded too “ethnic” for an ad agency.
• It is the price we have to pay to stand tall in society.
• To be continued next week.