Privacy in the Toilet

So I cannot help but take a cue from all the mimes and stories going around about the toilet conditions in Sochie at the Winter Olympics. Talk about a lack of privacy...

I don't know if the pictures and/or stories are real, but they sure are fun. And like most online authors, I plan to make the most of it, perpetuate the myth, and basically exploit the heck out of it. oo rah.

Let's compare the supposedly lack of privacy of Sochi Olympic toilets to the sanitary conditions of some countries. Sochi has toilets. Some countries do not. Are we as a leading world power spoiled? We have indoor plumbing, filtered water, sophisticated waste management, and private commodes almost everywhere. Is there some reason why Olympians cannot tolerate something less than the best? Is there some reason why our Olympians cannot see what it feels like to live on the other side?  We have antibiotics, right? Is privacy required to take a poop? As a nurse, we often had to deal with a patient's inability to urinate on command - hesitation. It's prevalent in pre-employment physicals and drug screens as well. Some people simply cannot perform with an audience.

So let's transfer some of these same considerations over to privacy. In the U.S., we are horrified of being asked to use the restroom in front of someone, but we don't consider personal information to be private. Bowel movements, yes. Date of birth, no. So that's our scale of privacy need. We don't flinch at sharing a lot of information or categories of information. We expect that companies who possess our information in certain contexts to be using that information to gain a business or competitive edge or to use it in some way that is advantageous to them. Thus, when there is a breach, fewer than 10%  of people contact the company or take them up on mitigation offers (anecdotally and my own experience dealing with breaches - seriously was closer to 3-5%).

Yet, in the E.U., people have other expectations. They expect privacy. They expect their information will only be used for the purpose it is collected and nothing else. Nothing else. And once the purpose is achieved, the information should be deleted. Deleted. So they are horrified at U.S. citizens' and businesses' cavalier attitudes towards privacy.

This would be a different world if we were as horrified at our information being gathered, shared, used, and kept as we are having to poop side-by-side with someone else. Take that and flush it.