Privacy

[note to self: stub to be expan­ded later]

When I vis­ited a recruit­ment agency the other day, they asked me to sign a waiver allow­ing them to store ‘per­sonal and sens­it­ive’in­form­a­tion about me and share it with poten­tial employ­ers. I refused. This, of course, caused con­sterna­tion and amazement. I don’t think that’s happened to them before. I poin­ted to vari­ous sec­tions in the text I’d been given to read and said they had no right in the con­text of an employ­ment dis­cus­sion to be asking for that inform­a­tion anyway. Oh, said they, that’s just a defin­i­tion of what con­sti­tutes ‘sens­it­ive’. Yes, says I, and where I sign, it says that I agree to inform­a­tion, ‘as defined above’be­ing held and/or disclosed.

In the end, we agreed that I could amend the defin­i­tion and the declar­a­tion. How­ever, far too often, we simply sign away our right to pri­vacy because it seems that we are being presen­ted with pri­vacy pro­tec­tion, when actu­ally it’s pri­vacy inva­sion, or because we seem not to have a choice or because, at the time, the our right to pri­vacy seems out­weighed by the bene­fit we gain by waiv­ing it.

This art­icle from The Guard­ian, poin­ted out by daern, shows how quickly that can go wrong. I’m glad I fussed about what inform­a­tion Aquent can store about me, espe­cially given the con­ser­vat­ive polit­ical nature of the west­ern world today.