A person tells you something during a difficult week. Months later, the difficulty has passed, but you still have the message. Whether you keep it, forward it or bring it up in company becomes a decision about someone else’s life, even though the phone belongs to you.
That is one reason privacy deserves more attention than we tend to give it between accepting a policy and getting on with whatever we came to do. Information concerns people who carry on living after it has been recorded. They reconsider, recover, regret what they said. Sometimes they simply want to explain themselves differently.
The Council of Europe reports that its updated HELP online course on data protection and privacy rights is available for enrolment. There is a worthwhile invitation in that announcement: to treat understanding these rights as something worth learning, rather than leaving the subject entirely to whoever writes the terms and conditions.
But there is an awkward domestic question alongside the legal one. How much information about other people do we feel entitled to use merely because we have it?
A family photograph, a private message or an account of somebody’s illness can become part of our own story. We were there. It affected us too. Asking permission may feel strangely formal within a close relationship, as though affection ought to settle the matter.
Affection does not always settle it. Being close to someone can make us less careful about the boundary between their experience and ours.
Of course, privacy cannot mean that nobody may ever speak about anything involving another person. Shared lives produce shared stories. Secrecy can also protect wrongdoing, and there are circumstances in which speaking is a responsibility. An absolute rule would soon become both unworkable and cruel.
What seems worth cultivating is a pause before making someone else more visible. Is this ours to share? Have we asked? Would we still publish it if the person concerned were sitting beside us, able to object before rather than afterwards?
Learning about data rights has a public purpose. It can also sharpen an ordinary responsibility. Before forwarding the message or posting the photograph, there is usually time to ask. We may find the answer inconvenient. That is precisely when asking begins to mean something.