Ethics Assignment Privacy

Do we have a moral obligation or duty to protect our privacy? Why or why not?

I believe that when it come to your own privacy everybody has their own obligation or duty to do with it what they wish. Allen states “other people must respect my privacy, and I must respect other people’s privacy, but I don’t have to respect my own privacy. For me, as to myself, privacy is optional.” This statement is exactly how everyone views privacy because you yourself should be able to decide when to protect your privacy not someone else. 

Is this obligation collective, individual or both?

This obligation is collective in a sense that everyone must collectively respect each other’s privacy, but it is also the individual’s obligation on how they handle their own privacy. With several different social media platforms available today, you can control what information of yours is shared and what is not, but when it comes to photos you almost have no control on who shares them. It is your own responsibility to make sure what you want to be private stay private and only allow what you want, to become public knowledge. I believe it would be morally wrong to share someone’s information that I would want to remain private if I was in that circumstance.

An example of this would be the nude celebrity photos that are being leaked by hackers. The hackers are committing a crime to access these celebrity’s private intimate photos. The celebrities are not doing a good job of protecting their privacy by allowing these photos to be uploaded into a non-secured area in the cloud. The fact that celebrities are more vulnerable to these kinds of attacks proves that they should be a lot more careful when dealing with their privacy and find more secure ways to store their photos and other information.