The second part discusses the
legal provision on privacy rights and the debates on the smart ID cards project and the control of SIM cards for national security.
Thai perspectives on ‘privacy’
Most writers on the concept of Thai privacy agree that the western concept of ‘privacy’ is not applicable to Thai social reality. But this may be changing in the age of the Internet, insofar as culture is forever dynamic and as some argue, a desire for privacy is a panhuman trait.1 According to Thais, the first con- notation of privacy is negative in the sense that the loss of privacy would bring shame, disrespect or loss of face in public. The word ‘private’ was assimilated into Thai culture around the reign of King Rama V (1868–1910) as the Thai word ‘pri-vade’ (modified from ‘private’) was used for ‘shud-pri-vade’ which means casual clothes vis-a` -vis military uniforms; ‘shud-pri-vade’ are clothes people would wear at home, which could range from pyjamas, dressing gowns or old tatty clothes to informal attire. Nor- mally, these clothes would be quite casual or ‘unre- spectable’ so that one would be embarrassed if caught wearing them at formal occasions or in public. Dur- ing the period of Kings Rama IV and V (1851–1868),
Western military uniforms, costumes and royal regalia were much admired and assimilated into Thai culture. So, this meaning corresponds to the concept of ‘privacy’ in Thai language of ‘being private’ or ‘living privately’ (khwam pen yu suan tua).
It is important to further notice that this concep- tion of privacy is basically collectivistic – not, as Westerners tend to assume, individual. That is, as Ramasoota makes clear, ‘being private’ in traditional Thailand applies primarily to the shared family space in which family members undertake a wide range of activities – including rituals, cooking and eating, and sleeping – as demarcated from the world outside: ‘‘It is the kind of privacy that is shared by intimate members of the same household. By this token, individualistic privacy is said to have no place in traditional Thai culture.’’2