A privacy divide? Rohan Samarajiva, visiting professor at Delft University of Technology, Netherlands; Director of External Programs, LIRNE.net [Learning Initiative for Reforms in Network Economies]; and Former Director General of Telecommunications of Sri Lanka. Over the past decade, the talk, and to some extent the practice, of privacy in rich countries has undergone a sea change. Privacy, once seen as a minority concern of paranoid activists, is today at the centre of e-commerce and information society discussions. Is this concern limited to rich countries? Is Internet and telecom privacy not a policy issue or a public concern in countries on the bleak side of the digital divide? Is privacy a non-universal human right? I address these questions from the dual perspectives of a student of privacy and of a former privacy policy-maker. There is little, if any, evidence on the level of public concern about privacy in poor countries. But it is a fact that the issue does not figure large in the policy agendas of these countries. For example in Sri Lanka, the civil war and its attendant problems of security, the cost of living and unemployment are likely to be listed as priority issues, not privacy. Even if the focus were to be narrowed to Internet and telecom, it is likely that access to voice telephones would be given more weight. Attitudes toward telephone numbers can indicate the intensity of telecom privacy concerns. In parts of the United States such as Nevada well over 50 per cent of residential telephone numbers are unpublished. Home telephone numbers are usually not printed on U.S. business cards. By contrast, it is a rare Sri Lankan business card that does not flaunt one. The street sign of the Coroner’s Court of Sri Lanka’s capital city displays the Coroner’s home number. In 1998-99, I chaired a public hearing on the improvement of telephone billing that addressed the making available of hitherto undisclosed and uncollected call details. I was surprised that only one of the over 400 public submissions mentioned privacy—an objection to the distribution of telephone bills unprotected by envelopes. Until the hearing, the major operator did not collect or provide call details. This was good for privacy but cause for much consumer unhappiness and billing disputes. The hearing had to decide on the form of disclosing more information. Do these facts not reinforce the claim that privacy is not universal? Academic research suggests otherwise. Irwin Altman of the U.S. has shown that the essence of privacy—the ability, explicitly or implicitly, to negotiate boundary conditions of social relations—is transcultural. What differs among cultures is the concrete form of privacy concern. It is natural to see a heightened awareness of Internet privacy in the U.S. The same form will not be found in Sri Lanka, where there are less than four telephones per one hundred people. When privacy was given concrete form, such as indiscriminate access to the details about telephone calls, people understood and cared. That enabled the crafting of a final order of the public hearing that safeguarded privacy while improving the transparency of the billing process. Policy discourses in digitally deprived countries have emphasized external forces as drivers of privacy policies. In developing elements of the legal information-communications infrastructure for the Sri Lankan government in the late 1980s, I found most persuasive the claim that our privacy policies must meet European Union standards for the sake of our trading relationships. But the external rationale alone is a weak foundation. Effective policies need public support. Privacy advocates within and outside government must rethink their missions as including a strong component of public education. What I learned in the public hearing was the need to translate abstract privacy concerns into stories that relate to the everyday lives of citizens. This is the key to bridging the privacy divide.