Privacy, Privacy Everywhere...

If Europeans care so much about privacy, why don't they close their curtains?

By Paul Raines

May 01, 2006 — CSO —

I had always heard about how serious Europeans are with regard to data privacy, but I was not quite prepared for it until I began working here.

"What do you mean I can't take home a business continuity plan with people's home contact information?" I was saying to a human resources representative at the nonprofit agency where I am CISO. "What if the emergency occurs in the middle of the night?"

She lifted one eyebrow. "What if that information fell into the wrong hands?" she asked. "Then where would we be?"

"The same place we are right now, the Netherlands," I replied. "Besides, what wrong hands are we talking about, my cat's?"

"This isn't the United States," she said. "We have data privacy laws here in Europe."

Of course privacy is important. Living now in a land that suffered under Nazi occupation in World War II, I can understand my colleagues' paranoia about the misuse of personal information. In fact, the United States would be a better place now if more people bothered to read their Fourth Amendment rights to privacy. However, what I find amusing and even downright silly at times is how this pervasive attitude toward data privacy completely disappears when it comes to personal privacy in everyday life.

For example, the Dutch tend to keep their front curtains wide open regardless of the time of day or night. You can walk along the sidewalk and not only view your neighbors in their bathrobes but also see what they enjoy watching on the tele. I once asked a Dutch friend to explain this. He shrugged as if it were no big deal. When I pressed him, he said if I were really insistent on finding some meaning, he reckoned it was because the Dutch are a very open, egalitarian society with no one thinking themselves better than anyone else. That attitude was formed over centuries of everyone having to pitch in to help keep the community from being flooded. Obviously, curtains don't keep water out, so that was supposed to explain everything.

And then there are the unisex public bathrooms. I admit that I once wound up in the women's bathroom of a trendy New York restaurant because I had forgotten my eighth grade biology lesson on chromosomes and gone through the door marked XX rather than XY. Here, however, such intermingling of the sexes is encouraged and often downright required.

Take, for instance, one pub I recently visited in Brussels. The one and only bathroom had the men's urinals in the entry room on the way to the unisex water closets. Imagine my chagrin trying to urinate whilst two giggly teenage girls walked into the room on their way to the WCs.