George Orwell had it right in his landmark book, "1984."
I think even he would be shocked by the reach of Big Brother today!
I never worried much about privacy, but I am starting to become uneasy.
I never worried about privacy because I live by a creed: 1) mind your own business (like I don’t have enough things to worry about besides other people’s business?) and 2) if someone shares confidential information, put it in a vault and tell no one. And I long ago accepted identity theft and credit card fraud as facts of life that will happen to all of us from time to time, like getting a flat tire.
As a communications professional, clients need to know that if they are planning an announcement on a certain date and need my help planning it, that every word they share goes in the vault. I discuss it with no one – coworkers, my spouse – I just keep my mouth shut! Simple! And if I have confidential business information to discuss, I use the phone, not email. So life was simple.
But things have changed. I can remember when, if you wanted to look at a nonprofit’s 990 tax form, you had to request it from them, and they could make it easy or hard. They could require that you pick it up in person and pay 10 cents per page to copy it. Most of us would not bother with that unless we had a very good need to know the information.
Now, anyone can hop on GuideStar and find the salary of the CEO of any nonprofit in about one minute. It’s all there on the 990 tax form. I know that many people check out the salaries of their nonprofit colleagues this way. Do they need to know? No. They are just nosy, and the info is there at their fingertips. It’s the equivalent of gossip.
Likewise, anyone who wants to could find my house on Google Earth and zoom in to see whether I maintain my yard and pull my weeds. That’s not a good thing!
I had a conversation with clients the other day about privacy, prompted by the much publicized privacy breach uncovered at Facebook and other social networking sites.
Then just today, one of my favorite writers, Peggy Noonan, wrote a very timely opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal:
Here's the first paragraph:
"This column is about privacy, a common enough topic but one to which I don't think we're paying enough attention. As a culture we may be losing it at a greater clip than we're noticing, and that loss will have implications both political and, I think, spiritual. People don't like it when they can't keep their own information, or their sense of dignified apartness. They feel violated when it's taken from them. This adds to the general fraying of things."
The right to privacy is so important that it is reflected in certain aspects of the Bill of Rights to the Constitution. The Bill of Rights reflects the concern among our founding framers for protecting specific aspects of privacy, including privacy of the person and possessions as against unreasonable searches (Google Earth), and the 5th Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination, which provides protection for the privacy of personal information (Facebook breach).
I think this poses a cautionary message for nonprofit communicators. Think twice -- no, think 10 times -- before you commit anything to electrons. Email. Facebook. Blogs.
It’s all enough to make one paranoid. I am not paranoid. But as I saw on a T-shirt once, “Just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you!"
Have a great day. I won't tell anyone.
Steve Cebalt, Author
Communications Handbook for Nonprofits and Foundations
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