The one-sentence truth: Privacy is not secrecy; it is partly the ability to control how information about us is collected, combined, interpreted and used.
Core vocabulary
Privacy, surveillance, consent, data governance, profiling, proportionality, cybersecurity, data minimisation, function creep, information asymmetry.
Consent
Consent is meaningful only when users understand what they agree to and possess a realistic choice. Clicking “accept” under severe information asymmetry may provide weak substantive autonomy.
Surveillance
Surveillance can serve safety, fraud prevention and service delivery while creating risks of misuse, chilling effects and excessive concentration of information power.
Proportionality
Data collection is easier to justify where the purpose is legitimate, the information is necessary, retention is limited and less intrusive alternatives are inadequate.
Function creep
Function creep occurs when data collected for one purpose gradually becomes used for others. This matters because an initially proportionate system can expand beyond its original justification.
Cybersecurity
More data can improve services while increasing the consequence of breaches. Convenience and security can reinforce or conflict depending on design.
Example sentence
“Data-driven public services can improve efficiency, but legitimacy depends on whether collection remains proportionate to purpose and whether citizens have credible safeguards against secondary use.”
Singapore application
Digital public services, payments, identity systems and smart-city technologies offer useful contexts for balancing convenience, trust, security and privacy.
Continue the JC2 GP vocabulary system
Return to General Paper Vocabulary Year 2 (JC2) and Vocabulary for Junior College (JC1–JC2).
Final thought
Privacy becomes most important precisely when information is useful, because usefulness creates incentives to collect more of it.