Conceptualising Privacy, Securing Identity: An Information Solution

Data collection has long been a tool of nation state, ensuring accountability and informing public policy, and for the common citizen this has been crucial to the smooth running of day-to-day life. However, developments in international information politics driven by public safety, policing and national security interests have served to legitimise creeping advances in surveillance practice and the collection of personal data by those in power.

This paper confronts the problems associated with the collection and storage of personal information, the manipulation of stored identities and the socio-political impact of information and its control. Drawing empirical evidence from a selection of national cases including Ireland, it seeks to reconcile the tensions that arise, finding a new generation of understanding of the value of privacy, the nature of modern identity and the instruments we use to protect it. 

The perspective draws on the liberal paradigm of privacy protection, aligning to the assumptions that privacy, and to some extent control of our private information, is important to our personal autonomy and identity (Westin, 1967).

Identity formation is closely linked to individuality, implying the existence of private space, in which one’s attitudes and actions can define one’s self (Clarke, 1994). Identity is also social and cultural and engrained in our membership and commitment to groups. As governments serve to individuate through imposed categorisation and classification, we lose hold over these freedoms. Identification processes deindividualise and the common man is increasingly vulnerable to social control and exclusion.

This paper investigates how the impact of ubiquitous surveillance practice on individual privacy and identity makes vulnerable objects of common citizens.

The paper presents recommendations for best practice for the protection of personal information, from a socio-political and cultural perspective, followed by a set of case-specific recommendations for Ireland.