If business competitors have access to my business plans they will gain an unfair advantage over me. If a would-be employer knows my sexual preferences he or she may unfairly discriminate against me. Seventh, and more generally, a measure of privacy is necessary simply in order for a person to pursue his or her projects, whatever those projects might be. For one thing reflection is necessary for planning, and reflection requires privacy. For another, knowledge of someone else's plans can enable those plans to be thwarted.
Autonomy requires a measure of privacy.
Equipped with this working account of privacy, including a basic taxonomy of the kinds of information regarded as private, let me now consider three different kinds of ethical issues posed by computer data bases. One kind of issue arises when a person discloses private data, such as the state of one's finances, to an organisation. Obviously the accuracy of this data is an ethical issue. The literature in computer ethics is replete with cases in which individual persons have been harmed in virtue of the inaccuracy of the data about them. However, the harm that might arise from inaccurate data is not in itself an issue of privacy.