Rosenblum: Everybody wants a little privacy

The lovely young woman to my right barely sat down before popping up again to take a selfie.

She was giddy to post the moment for the immediate world, and it was hard to fault her. Her dress was flowing, her hair was pulled up in a sleek Bardot-esque 'do, and we had great seats at the stunningly renovated Northrop, where Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal was about to perform.

I, on the other hand, couldn't shut off my cellphone, and the immediate world, fast enough. If the kids burned the house down, they'd have to wait two hours to tell us what they were able to rescue, and I would hope that the dog was included.

I've been thinking about personal privacy a lot lately, and how hard it is to attain, even if you really, really want to.

I'm the person praying that the video camera doesn't find me at a Lynx or Twins game, waiting for me to show my moves or act lusty for the Kiss Cam.

Pleeeease, noooooo!

I'm the person who wants to shout "Shhh!" when the doctor's assistant announces my full name to the entire waiting room. Hello, HIPAA?

I assumed that this intense preference for privacy was a generational thing, and, yes, I know I couldn't sound much older here. I figured that the world was divided into young people — at ease sharing everything from their current breakup to the chestnut and sage risotto they're about to eat — and not-so-young people who locked our diaries.

So I was surprised to learn just how wrong I was.

Jay Stanley was growing increasingly skeptical that teens and young adults have little concern about guarding their own privacy, so he started digging.

A senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union, Stanley told me young people who don't fret about Internet privacy are, in fact, outliers who make news and justify helicopter parenting.

Most youths care a lot about protecting their personal information, he said. It's just harder to accomplish in a world changing at warp speed.

His view is backed up by a recent Pew Research Center finding that people age 18 to 29 place a higher priority on privacy than any other age group. A study from the UC Berkeley School of Law found a similarly high level of concern about privacy among adults age 18 to 24.

"Online privacy is a concern for me," said Ben Waterfield, a junior studying mechanical engineering at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. He has multiple social media profiles, but "none of them are even close to disclosing anything too personal," he said.

"I guess I am just conscious of the fact that employers and other people are looking to see who I am. I also would rather not have someone know everything about me before they meet me. I think Internet privacy is a big deal because not only can someone search for your private information, you'll also probably never find out who has it and what their intentions are."

On the other hand, it turns out that plenty of people in my baby-boomer demographic are eager to shake their groove thing for the camera, and upload the video to Facebook.

A more accurate measure of privacy needs, Stanley suggested, is to divide us by how we're wired, rather than where we fall along generational lines.

The divide is further muddied by what kind of privacy we're talking about. Maybe being tagged in other people's photos, which Stanley calls "personal bodily privacy," is no big deal to you. But when it comes to "data privacy," you wouldn't think of banking online due to your fear of identify theft.

Here's why it matters. Advertising companies, Stanley said, would like nothing better than "to cement the impression that a new generation is coming up that doesn't care about silly old privacy concerns." We buy into that falsehood, and, pretty soon, we've all lost control of those silly old privacy concerns and law enforcement can access our six-month-old e-mails, as well as our Dropbox accounts and private Instagram photos.

Wait. Due to the outdated 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, law enforcement already can do that.

Stanley said he understands that we can't control everything related to our privacy. But where we can control it, and when we care, we should act.

Talk to the medical director at your clinic about staff using first names only. Step away for another hot dog or a stretch at the ballgame when you see that videocam coming at you. Use your privacy settings on social networks. If you need help with that, ask kids.

We all are at risk of making stupid decisions that compromise our privacy. But it's easy to mitigate that with a little bit of education.

"The laws just haven't kept up," Stanley said. "You can't depend on being protected. We need to work together to get those protections."

gail.rosenblum@startribune.com