The Ethics of Privacy

It seems likely that most people would agree that they have some expectation of privacy when conducting private business transactions – like having their photographs developed, for example. While you don’t have any active protection along the lines of attorney-client privilege, most of us would be fairly upset by the idea of total strangers going through our negatives and deciding if our behavior seems beyond reproach. At the same time, most people would hope that if ordinary people working ordinary jobs run across potential evidence of a crime being committed that they would report it to the relevant authorities – especially if the crime in question is a particularly heinous offense, like child abuse or child pornography. But what happens when these two generally accepted principles come into direct conflict – possibly in the same news story?

If you missed it in the news aggregation sites this week, there was a case where a family had taken the memory stick from their digital camera to the photo counter at a large retail store near their home to get prints made from their vacation photos. Unfortunately, the memory stick also included bath-time pictures of the three kids (ages 2, 3 and 5), and one of the photo technicians noticed these, decided that naked pictures of small children were probably evidence of something, and alerted the child protective services in the jurisdiction. The authorities “investigated” the matter and wound up removing the children from the home for several weeks until it could finally be determined that there was nothing wrong, no crimes were being committed, and there was no reason to go on with the case (and no chance of prosecuting anyone). Which is pretty much the end of the matter, except for the lawsuits and the corresponding question about what (if anything) the retail business involved should do about the situation…

On the one hand, your employees have the same responsibility as any other citizen to report crimes they become aware of, and even if you could order them not to (you can’t) there’s an excellent chance they wouldn’t obey you. Nor would you want them to; the last thing your company needs is to have prevented employees from reporting the next 9/11 attack or similar outrage just because you want to avoid inconvenient lawsuits. But by the same token, you don’t really need to pay your personnel to go through customer pictures looking for evidence of crimes, and you definitely don’t need to have them see a few family photos, jump to conclusions, and get your store (or your corporation, or worst of all, you personally) sued into the process…

So the question seems to be, where do you draw the line? At what point does it stop being your employees performing their civic duty and become a matter of nosy idiots taking too much of an interest in things that are none of their business? How can you tell, months or years before the event actually arrives, how to set your corporate policy so as to avoid incidents of this type? In the long run, parents are going to continue taking the sort of naked baby pictures that feature in so many wedding albums (and other special events documents) twenty or thirty years later, and running the photo counter in a drug store or general merchandise store is going to remain one of the most colossally boring occupations imaginable. Eventually, inevitably, somebody is going to start looking through the batches of pictures just to stay awake, and they’re going to run into something that might just provide the opportunity to call the authorities and create some excitement…

Which means that, sooner or later, if your business has anything to do with customer media and under-paid employees, you are going to face this exact scenario. And even if you have given your personnel very clear instructions and careful training on how to handle these situations, it's still quite possible that your entire corporation's policy, conduct and financial future will be in the hands of some teenage employee with a deficient sense of perspective (or possibly humor). When that day arrives, how will you handle the case?

It’s worth thinking about…