Until recently in Doña Ana County, certain property-related public records were published online to assist mortgage companies, real estate brokers, and title agencies with their transactions. Unfortunately, social security numbers were included on some of those documents—a fact that was brought to the attention of the County Commission. With someone’s social security number, a skilled hacker can acquire a vast amount of information about an individual, allowing for rampant identity theft.

When the site was taken down to protect the public, there was grave concern among the industries mentioned, because internet access to these documents made it easier and faster to conduct business. Though the issue was quickly resolved, it highlights a public policy question that will only become more important as technology advances. When and how should privacy be sacrificed?

Few issues in the political sphere these days receive wide support from both the left and the right. However, Americans from across the political spectrum have been sounding the alarm that privacy is under serious threat.

Our privacy is important for many reasons. It protects us against the power of health insurance companies who might use information about us to deny access to insurance. It protects us against the enormous financial and psychological costs of identity theft. It protects us against dishonest individuals within governments or corporations who would use it to harass or take advantage of us. Yet even more fundamentally than the protections it provides, privacy is important for its own sake. As citizens of a nation raised on frontier values, Americans have grown up with the idea that you should stick to your business and I should stick to mine.

Most of us have bits of information that we do not want everyone to know about. For some people it might be what they buy, for others whom they date, for still others where they worship. These are all things that a citizen usually has the option of keeping private. They are sensitive and can cause personal embarrassment, or even harm, to reputations if they became known. This is even truer in small towns, like the ones in Southern New Mexico, where everybody knows everybody.

Businesses, on the other hand, love to know personal information because they can use it in the design and marketing or their products. Telephone polls, volunteer surveys, and the like have been used since the dawn of capitalism. But they were always filled out on a volunteer basis. With the explosion of the internet and other electronic means of storing and transferring data, all sorts of companies have begun to exploit new technologies for obtaining massive amounts of information very quickly.

In the new world of terrorist threats, government, too, has become increasingly hungry for gathering individuals’ personal information. Though practices like keeping records of offenders’ fingerprints are widely established, strategies like warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of library records have started being used. This has allowed government intelligence agencies to stockpile intimate information in the hope of capturing criminals.

In a dictatorship or society with totally unregulated capitalism, these approaches are vital. But are they good for the individual living in a democracy?

In America, we let embrace capitalism because it generates the most wealth for the most people. We also let our government know some personal facts because it is helpful in protecting us from threats. These are good approaches. They work. But both government and corporations have been known to cross the line into places that should only belong an individual. This must not be allowed to happen.

What it comes down to is this: New technologies and increased globalization are going to increase both the amount of information that governments and corporations can obtain about you, and the speed at which they can get it. Citizens need to press public officials into monitoring and (when necessary) regulating these new practices so that in our quest for money and safety we do not infringe on a value that is just as sacred; the ability to say, “That’s none of your business.”