Do you want to hear what I just heard?

A Review of the Concept of Privacy in the Church (October 2024)

If you want to get an ear-full about privacy of personal information, work for the government.  There is not a government in Canada that hasn’t embraced the concept and produced copious rules, regulations and even laws that protect privacy.  These protect the privacy of its employees as well as its clients (i.e., people and business).  Further, businesses that want to supply services to the government will have privacy baked into their contracts.

Governments’ most rigorous scrutiny is reserved for health privacy.  Very restrictive measures have been developed to control how such information can be collected and used, and even who is allowed to see it.  Every member of the public has the right to see their own health records upon request, but who else can see them is strictly controlled.  Government employees have been fired and even charged due to ‘snooping’ into health records they had no reason to see.

The concept of privacy exploded when it became clear that Internet-based services including social media were collecting great volumes of information on users.  That concern spilled over to how brick-and-mortar businesses routinely collect and use personal information of its customers.  This was an impetus for the Canadian government to pass legislation aimed at businesses with respect to privacy issues1.  The world-over is grappling with Internet privacy issues, with the European Union leading the way.

If governments are making such efforts in reigning in the collection and use of personal information, it must mean it is of great concern to the voting public.  The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada conducted surveys between November 23 and December 18, 2022 of 1,500 Canadians, aged 16 and older, on privacy-related issues2.   Highlights of that survey include:

• The vast majority of Canadians (93%) expressed some level of concern about the protection of their privacy. This includes 38% of Canadians who said they are extremely concerned about the protection of personal privacy. 

• Six in 10 (62%) Canadians surveyed said they follow news about privacy issues very (19%) or somewhat (43%) closely. 

• Just over half of the Canadians surveyed (58%; down from 63% in 2020) feel that the federal government respects their privacy rights.

• Far fewer believe that businesses respect their privacy rights (39% down from 45% in 2020) 

• 89% of Canadians are at least somewhat concerned about social media platforms gathering personal information posted online to create a profile of them,

• and almost as many (87%) are at least somewhat concerned about how companies and organizations might use information available about them online to make decisions about them, such as for a job, an insurance claim or health coverage.

Does any of this apply to the Church in Canada?  I suggest there are two areas of concern: institutional privacy and interpersonal privacy.

The institutional side addresses how individual churches control the personal information they collect.  I see no reason why churches should differ from government and businesses in their moral requirement to maintain privacy of personal information.  This would include: 

• inventorying the types of personal information collected, 

• ceasing to collect information that is not needed by the church to run its ministries and business,

• creating detailed privacy policies and rules, 

• training staff on their application, 

• communicating these to congregants, along with their right to access their own files, 

• safeguarding paper and electronic record from inappropriate access, and

• monitoring church communications for information that should not be shared (e.g., birth dates)

Then there is what I call interpersonal privacy.  Basically, what congregants share with others about persons other than themselves (including statements made to the congregation as a whole during services and general meetings).  The question that arises is: “If privacy of information is to be protected by individual churches, why would the general concept not likewise apply to its congregants?”

People do what people do, and it may be informative to read the article: Does the Bible get it wrong about gossip?  However, would it be morally imperative for a church to at least talk about expectation of privacy and give its crowd some tools on how to do this in the context of interpersonal communications?

You need not go far to see the significance of large-scale privacy breaches in the business world, often leading to bad publicity, loss of business, settlements with clients to cover credit monitoring, and class-action lawsuits.  This is consistent with one other piece of data from the Privacy Commissioner’s report2: “Just over one-third (38% versus 40% in 2020) have stopped doing business with a company that experienced a privacy breach.”  Be clear that it is not saying what they would do, but what they have done.  This is not a consequence that any church would like to experience.  And, would the victim be all that mollified to learn that it wasn’t the church that breached privacy but was a congregant?  Maybe, maybe not.  

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1. Government of Canada, Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (S.C. 2000, c. 5), https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/p-8.6/index.html

2.  Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, 2022-23 Survey of Canadians on Privacy-Related Issues, January 2023, https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/opc-actions-and-decisions/research/explore-privacy-research/2023/por_ca_2022-23/