The privacy and the freedom of expression when analyzed, usually come into conflict with one another.
The second may come into conflict with the former, and so it is necessary to find points of balance and harmony, amputating a piece of one here, shrinking the other there, in mutual sacrifice and tension, but without annihilating any. This is also the usual legal approach, seeking what is commonly called an exercise of practical agreement between conflicting values or interests. Now this perspective of the relationship is very certain, and these agreement exercises are not only essential for the health of liberal and democratic collective life, but also intellectually and legally passionate. However, there is another way of looking at the relationship, which is usually neglected, and which seems to me to be essential, above all taking into account certain aspects of the way of living that we already have and what we anticipate we will have.
In fact, it must be taken into account that the relation between privacy and freedom of expression also takes place in the opposite direction to that, which is usually at the center of the analysis, insofar as the former is a condition of the second. That is, if it is true that freedom of expression can threaten privacy, it is no less true that the lack of it can kill it. Because? Very simple, that sometimes we do not even think about it. If we are afraid that someone will listen to us, read or watch, we shut up, we do not express ourselves or we do not do it freely. If we do not believe that we have privacy and that, we can express ourselves in different subjects with different degrees of knowledge and reserve, then we inhibit ourselves, we censor ourselves, more or less, according to the degree of surveillance. The death of privacy is half way (or more) to the death of freedom. Citing the obvious, and at a time when the narratives about dystopias are fashionable (perhaps not by accident). So, neither in the toilet is it free to say or write what you want, and that is the zero degree of freedom of expression, while it is the zero degree of privacy. Which means that the obscene, and the humorists who express themselves in the public toilets doors are, in a certain way, a civilizational achievement.
Privacy suffers various and intense threats, which come from the increasing surveillance of the public authorities in the name of security, but also, and much, from private surveillance, those that proliferate in this admirable, not very private and very libertine world, that social networks and cyberspace constitute nowadays. This world where surveillance is for some a business model (for example, advertising, "likes" profiling, offering services, etc.), for others a way of life or even a non-life, and for so many a trap that they can not realize. After all, it's easier to get a peek in social networks and cyberspace, than trough the keyhole of the toilet door. Be careful with what you leave there recorded.
