This article addresses individual privacy and asks questions about privacy using a (hopefully) thought-provoking but limited scenario. I wrote this specifically to garner your thoughts, comments and concerns about privacy.

Imagine your neighbor is a burglar. And each time your neighbor breaks into a home and steals, he takes a picture of his crime in progress. Now imagine he puts that picture on his personal computer and shares it all over the internet. That picture goes around the world, exposing the crime and the victim with every viewing.

Is it a breach of your neighbor’s privacy if you, a private citizen, make law enforcement aware of your neighbor’s activities?

We know the burglar violated the rights of the property owner at least once. But is it a further violation of the victim’s right to privacy to post pictures of the crime scene on the internet?

Imagine you are sick and tired of burglars. Now, you know some burglars share photos of their crimes over the internet (thanks to your neighbor) and you know you could help law enforcement catch these bad guys because you used your noodle to figure out how to accurately identify them online.

So you set about designing a software solution to what you consider to be a big problem. In order to accurately identify these criminals (they are committing a crime) and to help law enforcement apprehend them, you determine you need a combination of public records and private data, both of which require cash to acquire. You shell out the cash.

The more you look at the data in the records you’ve acquired, the more you begin to see how you could also design another product that could be used to help some businesses lower their risk when making decisions about potential customers.

Because you believe in The American Dream, it hits you that you could profit from the private sector with one product while giving away your shiny, new burglar-identifying product to law enforcement. You decide to start your own business.

You show law enforcement The Burglar Buster; they love it. And they want it. Some people raise concerns that you shouldn’t have access to your software that law enforcement is now using. So, you commit high security office space in your building along with your new product to law enforcement and you stay out of there. You give it away to them. It’s free for them to use. Soon, burglars around the country are being apprehended. In fact, law enforcement and statisticians are now able to more accurately understand just how many burglarys have been committed!

Is this a breach of your neighbor’s privacy?

To develop business and increase sales, you travel the country pitching your risk-reducing product to businesses and organizations who have an interest in reducing their financial risk. You know these companies want to reduce their risk at the front-end and the back-end of their cycle. In other words, they want to make better decisions about who to do business with and they want to reduce the fraud that has crept into their profit-centers. Your software can help them do both.

Is this a breach of a potential customer or client’s privacy?

Given this scenario, what are your thoughts on privacy?

For Marshall Kirkpatrick‘s opinion about privacy in the context of social networking, you can read his article, “Why Facebook is Wrong: Privacy Is Still Important.” at ReadWriteWeb.