From 2001 but still means everything, Still searching for a private moment in Toronto

George Radwanski
Privacy Commissioner of Canada

A section from text by George Radwanski

The same is true of privacy. It's an instinctive human need, but we mainly recognize its importance on those occasions when we feel its absence.

We pull our curtains at home, because we don't want strangers observing us as we go about our private lives. A peeping Tom, or even having the neighbors watching too closely, is psychologically very disturbing, even if no tangible harm is being done.

We don't like it when someone reads over our shoulder on an airplane or on the subway, because it's an encroachment on our privacy.

Anyone who has ever experienced a burglary, or even a car break-in, knows that the sense of violation, of intrusion into our private space, can be even more upsetting than the loss of actual property.

So privacy is an intrinsic human need. And it's also a fundamental human right, recognized in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

That's because there can be no real freedom without privacy. In fact, many have suggested that privacy is the right from which all others flow, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of choice, any freedom you can name.

None of us wants to go through life feeling that any moment someone may be, either metaphorically or literally, looking over our shoulder. If we have to weigh every action, every purchase, every statement, every human contact, wondering who might find out about it, judge it, misconstrue it, or somehow use it to our detriment, we are not truly free.

That's why lack of real privacy is a distinguishing characteristic of so many totalitarian societies.

But I know that some people say, "that's fine in theory, but I'm an honest person, I have nothing to hide."