On Friday, while receiving a group of foreign academics attending an international conference on information technology, President Chen Shui-bian (
Chen's remark came in a backdrop of a series of controversial disclosure and leaks of personal information, prompting discussions about the role of personal privacy in a democracy and explosion in the amount of free information available, thanks to the Internet.
The Ministry of Interior was severely criticized last week for making land-registration information accessible on the Internet to the general public. The fact that the information available includes the personal identification numbers and birthdate of land owners -- information that could be used by unscrupulous people to forge ID cards or apply for credit cards, cash cards and cellphone numbers. Such information could also be of interest to criminals looking for kidnapping victims.
The ministry's decision to remove such sensitive information from public access is a step in the right direction. However, it may not be enough. It is also imperative for the government to establish more effective mechanisms to trace individuals who might have accessed such data.
Only a few days earlier, there were news reports that information submitted by 2,000 people who had applied for Citibank credit cards via the Internet had been accessible to anyone over the Internet for more than three months.
With democratization, a heighten sense of individualism, which had been suppressed during the martial law era, has grown rapidly. With this rising sense of individualism has come a growing demand for the right to privacy.
The rapid evolution of technology, however, has also led to a rapid increase in the amount of information readily available as well as making it easier to exchange such data. While these changes have brought many positive things such as improved efficiency, convenience and cost-savings, the loss of personal privacy is a negative side-effect that should not be ignored.
Maintaining a proper balance between all these things is imperative. Among the distinguishing characteristics of totalitarianism are the lack of transparency in government policies, decision-making and activities, lack of public monitoring and supervision and extreme violation of personal privacy such as the personal, mail and phone surveillance of political dissidents.
The reverse should be true in a democracy such as Taiwan. Government transparency, as well as the transparency of officials' public conduct are essential. In contrast, the personal privacy of the average citizen must be protected as much as possible.
The importance of protecting personal privacy is evident from the fact that it is on the list of human rights protected under both the human-right protection bill being drafted by the Presidential Office and the UN's International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. How to establish a mechanism to protect this right is an especially important task for the Democratic Progressive Party, which has proclaimed human-rights protection to be the core of its administration and campaign platforms.
From the Iran war and nuclear weapons to tariffs and artificial intelligence, the agenda for this week’s Beijing summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is packed. Xi would almost certainly bring up Taiwan, if only to demonstrate his inflexibility on the matter. However, no one needs to meet with Xi face-to-face to understand his stance. A visit to the National Museum of China in Beijing — in particular, the “Road to Rejuvenation” exhibition, which chronicles the rise and rule of the Chinese Communist Party — might be even more revealing. Xi took the members
After Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing, most headlines referred to her as the leader of the opposition in Taiwan. Is she really, though? Being the chairwoman of the KMT does not automatically translate into being the leader of the opposition in the sense that most foreign readers would understand it. “Leader of the opposition” is a very British term. It applies to the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, and to some extent, to other democracies. If you look at the UK right now, Conservative Party head Kemi Badenoch is
A Pale View of Hills, a movie released last year, follows the story of a Japanese woman from Nagasaki who moved to Britain in the 1950s with her British husband and daughter from a previous marriage. The daughter was born at a time when memories of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki during World War II and anxiety over the effects of nuclear radiation still haunted the community. It is a reflection on the legacy of the local and national trauma of the bombing that ended the period of Japanese militarism. A central theme of the movie is the need, at
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on Friday used their legislative majority to push their version of a special defense budget bill to fund the purchase of US military equipment, with the combined spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.78 billion). The bill, which fell short of the Executive Yuan’s NT$1.25 trillion request, was passed by a 59-0 margin with 48 abstentions in the 113-seat legislature. KMT Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), who reportedly met with TPP Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) for a private meeting before holding a joint post-vote news conference, was said to have mobilized her
RSS