One of the challenges in talking about privacy issues is that we tend to treat privacy as if it were an abstract concept, rather than a concrete one. I want my conversations about privacy to be in concrete terms, so I had to come up with a clear idea of what I meant by privacy.

I have long associated privacy with a right, a freedom, a form of protection, but what does my right to privacy actually protect? Privacy protects identity. Identity is a form of property, and privacy is the freedom from trespass of that property. No one but me is entitled to make use of my identity.

The problem is, we haven’t been assigning much value to identity. Back when we lived in smaller communities, the function of identity was served by reputation – that’s often still the case in Vermont, in fact. When everyone around you remembers that time you had to go to the principal’s office in the third grade, your birth certificate and your drivers license don’t get a lot of wear and tear. But those small town reputations don’t scale well; you can’t take them with you into the world of e-commerce. Well, maybe the problem is that you can take your reputation online with you, but other people can take your reputation online, too.

The fact is, our identity, our reputation, those defining characteristics that say who we are and where we live and how much we have in the bank and how good a risk we are – those bits of information are no longer just irrelevant bits of fraying paper. Those bits of information are valuable property.

We have to start being responsible about that property. My son can’t leave his bike lying out in the rain, or in the driveway behind my car, and I can’t leave my personal identification on every online form that requests it. As a consumer, I have to say no to the lure of free services in exchange for information about who I am and where I work and what I might buy. As a citizen, I have to assert my property rights to identity – the government is not entitled to use my property without my consent and without compensation. They can’t use my home to house militia, and they can’t use my identity to house the Department of Homeland Security, either.

As a businessperson, I have to acknowledge the value of my customer’s property – and the fact that their identities are still their identities, not mine. Think about the role of trust and reputation in a transaction: when the good or service is exchanged for consideration, the receiver’s trust and reputation may be used to verify the desirability of the transaction, but the ownership of trust and reputation is not transferred in the process. Businesses do not own their customers’ identities.

Finally, I would make the point that we lose the privacy debate as soon as we allow privacy to be framed in terms of secrecy. When we speak of private property, we are not talking about hidden treasure; we’re talking about property protected from trespass. Privacy is a public concern.

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