We have returned from Florida and I am emerging from jet-lag, just in time to appear today on the BBC World Have Your Say radio programme this afternoon on the rather incoherent subject of Privacy. If you are interested the link to the programme is here, until it fades away.

I cited an extract from this argument by Roy Greenslade, one among many good ones out there on the way English law is currently looking at these issues:

We want there to be a fair and reasonable balance between the right to privacy and the right to know. And the best criterion for judging between the two must be the public interest (and not merely interesting the public).

Is that really it (said I)? Boosting someone else’s supposed right to privacy means diminishing someone else’s free speech, someone else’s right to blog or read or talk or sing. The High Court is not always the best place to ‘weigh’ the balance of advantage between an emotional plaintiff and an abstract principle such as ‘freedom’. 

As Ian Hislop argued robustly on WHYS, the current state of the English law matched by the inclination of some judges is in effect allowing wealthy men to silence less powerful women – not much justice there. Once upon a time we had ‘publish and be damned’ – now we seem to have ‘only publish if the court says so’.

The programme featured contributions from listeners, which together brought out perfectly that no set of laws can manage incompatible issues of principle or keep up with the racing advance of social networking and the access of hundreds of millions of people to sassy new small cameras and IT kit.

There is no clear right answer on Privacy, in theory or in practice, and crafty new ideas such as the so-called ‘right to be forgotten’ (also described as the right to have ‘personal data’ deleted from commercial databases) can end up being abused to extend state power – if I choose to shop at Tesco, why should any data held by Tesco on me which I chose to freely hand over be described as solely ‘my’ data? They paid for it to be collected. Should Tesco be denied the right to use the data represented by my DNA (fingerprints) as distributed round the store if they suspect me of shoplifting?

On the other hand, the myriad information about us all sloshing around out there can now be analysed to see big (and not so big) patterns of activity – and attitude. This does empower in various novel and not necessarily benign ways the people and organisations able to crunch all those numbers.

It’s all about trade-offs, and maybe it’s best to let consumers and companies come to workable and more or less transparent informal arrangements at their own pace than try to create too clever legal and regulatory frameworks which will be out of date as soon as they are drafted. 

In other words, we readily accept the risk that by driving a car we may have a horrible or even fatal crash at some point. Maybe we likewise should accept that we may have a reputation crash too at some point during life as part of the ‘cost’ of enjoying all these clever new IT toys, and insure as best we can against it.

My bottom line. If a rich footballer or entrepreneur cheats on his/her spouse, the law should not stop the spouse or the partner in cheating or someone else writing about it or discussing it in public. Mess around? Fine – but take the risks that your messing will be exposed. No-one should be stopped by the state from writing the truth.

Sure that will create some rough justice in some high-profile cases. But so does every other outcome in this fearsomely difficult area. Let’s at least err on the side of ‘truth will out’.