In an op-ed for The New York Times’ Privacy Project, Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger write about the importance of obscurity as a privacy concept. The authors explain obscurity is “the privacy you have in public and the privacy you have in groups”; however, the proliferation of cellphone location data and facial-recognition technologies, for example, has impacted an individual’s ability to be obscure. Hartzog and Selinger state the failure to value obscurity “shows where we’ve gone wrong in the debates over data and surveillance,” while adding just how important it is for the collective well-being. “To develop as humans, people must be free to try things they might later regret,” the authors write. “This is how we become better people. Without obscurity, we wouldn’t have the freedom to take risks, fail and dust ourselves off.” (Registration may be required to access this story.)
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