Guarding what remains

We all enjoy a right to privacy, guaranteed to us as Americans by the U.S. Constitution. Right? Well, actually, that “right” has been divined by judges only in the last 50 years or so, and it has been used to justify other rights, including that of abortion (a topic for another day).
Ironically, we seem to worry more about privacy in this age than did previous generations. Somehow, when we truly lived “in community,” privacy wasn’t something as guarded. It was expected that you knew what your neighbors were doing, and that they knew what you were doing.
As our economy has become more service-oriented, what we do for a living is less apparent to our neighbors. And as our lives are spent increasingly indoors – with more leisure time, with air-conditioning, with television – our lives have become more private.
Maybe it’s not ironic that we should worry more about privacy now, since the computer age has brought new challenges. Data of all sorts is kept on us and on our behavior. Now, our purchases are tracked, our movements are tracked, our conversations are tracked and video cameras spring up in metropolitan areas. All with very little fuss. Should you need to call 911, now “they” know right where you are, even if you call on your cell phone. Not that this is a bad thing, we acknowledge, and surely we have nothing to hide. But it ought to give us pause, at least.
And it did last week, when we carried the story about local folks in Sonoma donating to the several presidential campaigns getting underway in earnest. Thanks to the campaign finance laws of the last few years, all donations of at least $200 are tracked. (We’ll also leave to another day the unintended consequences of these campaign “reforms.”)
How people spend their own money in support of candidates seems their own affair. But now that, too, is tracked, and once it’s tracked, it’s in a database someplace. Was it public information? Yes, but it troubled some of us on the editorial board, at least, to publish personal information of that type. It seemed too inquisitive, too prurient, to report who gave what to whom.
It does create an interesting issue; simply because we can find information doesn’t mean we should publish it. We can discover what property people own, and what vehicles they drive, and who’s divorcing whom, but that doesn’t make the information newsworthy. Ultimately, we judged that individual donations to national campaigns fall into the same category, limited as they are, by law, to relatively small amounts.
The total numbers, however, are certainly newsworthy, and it was interesting to see how much more Barack Obama’s campaign is receiving from people in Sonoma Valley than are the campaigns of the other candidates. And when there are controversial local issues, such as Measure C last year, individual donations would be newsworthy, and you can count on the Sun to report them.
Otherwise, count us among those who would urge, and practice, restraint. Privacy, even today, is worth guarding, while it still exists.