Information Privacy in a Surveillance State: A Perspective from Thailand

Abstract

This chapter examines information privacy as manifested and understood in Thai society. Multidisciplinary perspectives—philosophical, anthropological, historical, legal, policy oriented, and communicative—are used to explore information privacy, which arguably is emerging as an ethic in Thailand. While the diffusion of ICTs along with the country’s aspiration toward an information society may have given rise to this conceptual emergence, the longstanding surveillance that characterizes the Thai state is reckoned to be a major hindrance to a meaningful realization of this ethic in Thai society.