At some time or another, most of us have engaged in unethical and even illegal surveillance. We’ve read diaries, looked into wallets, read text messages, gone through drawers and listened into phone conversations. And most of us have justified this to ourselves by focusing on our feelings of suspicion, powerlessness or fear. Like News of the World, some of us have justified our privacy invasions with the betrayals we’ve discovered.
Several years ago when I worked as a counsellor in a workplace dominated by men whose job it was to investigate crime, I discovered that for some people and in some workplaces, surveillance is a habit, a way of being in the world where everyone is under suspicion. Where the belief is that privacy is for those who have something to hide.
Whenever we allow ourselves to invade another’s privacy we are functioning without intact personal boundaries and acting as a perpetrator violating the integrity of another. We may spy because we feel vulnerable. Someone else may have the power to harm us and we may believe that it’s our right to know what they’re doing. But however vulnerable we may be, this invasion is still a violation.
Personal boundary violations are not far removed from the phone hacking scandal, because both rely on prioritising individual self-interest. If I give myself the right to spy, I’m acting as if I have a right to information more than you have a right to your own private life. This creates a situation where the argument becomes about my rights versus yours, rather than a wider exploration of the ethics of surveillance in general. This confusion of the rights of the individual to privacy and the ethics of surveillance itself is a problem when it comes to responding to boundary violations in the workplace.
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