As expected of Kyoko Shimbun. Published on March 11, 2016, the article “Edited Yearbooks, Anonymous Essay Collections… The Privacy Wave Reaches Graduation Keepsakes”1 uses humor while getting to the very essence of privacy.
It says:
“It has long been standard practice for the media, under the guise of reporting, to buy up the school essay collections and yearbooks of celebrities and suspects. Yet these were never meant to be merchandise; they are keepsakes. They are not distributed so that people can check whether someone has had plastic surgery or whether an abnormal personality had begun to emerge in childhood.”
“Now that the information circulates online and cannot be erased, there is no choice but to change keepsakes so that individuals cannot be identified.”
Exactly right.
The fact that individuals must resort to such abnormal measures to protect themselves surely demonstrates the abnormality and gravity of today’s privacy violations by the news media2.
Then, in another sharp retort:
The academy’s principal, Q, explained the matter on condition of anonymity.
With this, the article also cuts straight through the absurdity of society’s “anonymization methods.”
Moreover:
The academy plans to administer drugs in advance to erase students’ memories of their time there, so that they will not provide others with their classmates’ personal information in the future.
This points out that the actors responsible for serious privacy violations include not only the news media but ordinary individuals as well. One can only admire how brilliantly the article makes its point.
The article makes a powerful, intuitive case for the need to move from the protection of personal information to the protection of privacy. Hats off.
- http://kyoko-np.net/2016031101.html
- Because the Act on the Protection of Personal Information is an administrative law, its application has an exception for information used for journalistic purposes, in order to avoid government interference in speech.
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