Marginalized Knowledge: An Agenda for Indigenous Knowledge Development and Integration with Other Forms of Knowledge

Issues of Information Ethics

Information ethics has been broadly subdivided by Holmer (nd: 2) and Eining and Lee (1997:4) into four fields, namely access, intellectual property, privacy, and accuracy.

Privacy

Access to private and personal information poses serious ethical questions with regard to the right to privacy. In order to understand the nature of these ethical questions, it is important to define the nature of privacy. Britz (1996:98) emphasizes the concept of solitude, and defines privacy as a right to be left alone. Parent (as cited by Doss and Loui) in Holmer (n.d:2), however, is of the opinion that this definition of privacy is not adequate. He feels that the right to be left alone is not sufficient, as there are many other ways to annoy, harass, or harm someone that have nothing to do with privacy (in the context of being left alone). Parent in Holmer (nd: 2) thus proposes a new definition: “privacy is the condition of not having made public undocumented, unpublished, factual, personal knowledge that most people would not want publicized”. According to Doss and Loui in Holmer (nd), privacy has three separate elements, namely: secrecy, anonymity and solitude. He believes that secrecy requires limits on the disclosure of personal information. Anonymity is the absence of unwanted information, and solitude refers to the lack of close physical proximity to others. Mason in Eining and Lee (1997:20) identifies two issues that threaten privacy, i.e., the growth of information technology and the increased value of information in decision making. They believe that while current IT allows companies and governments to collect large amounts of information on individuals, the speed of retrieval and the transmission of this information threatens information security. A second, and more insidious threat, is the increased value of information in decision-making processes. Information is increasingly valuable to policy makers; they covet it, even if acquiring it invades another's privacy. The two authors assert that the ethical concern arises from the need to balance the requirement for information for decision making with the concern for the privacy of individuals. According to Eining and Lee (1997:23), the questions which arise from the issue of privacy include, among others: What information should one be required to divulge about one’s self to others, and under what conditions? And what information should one be able to keep strictly to one’s self?