Mal Fletcher comments on the value of privacy

Access to online pornography is another cause for heartache among children and parents.

Last week, a major UK newspaper featured a mother's heart-rending response, after her 11-year-old son had been subjected to pornographic videos online. He had viewed the videos, some of which featured violence, because his friends had pressured him to watch.

As a result of just one viewing, he has become withdrawn and now has trouble sleeping. Normally a well-adjusted boy, he is unable to reconcile what he has seen with the type of respectful behaviour he's been taught to value in others. He wishes, says his mother, that he could 'unsee' the videos.

Bullying and pornography represent strong threats to the mental health and emotional development of young people.

Fingerprinting children in school certainly cannot be categorised alongside these social ills. Yet encouraging a low respect for personal privacy among young people is in itself, if not dangerous, at least troublesome.

In our hyper-connected age, privacy is increasingly falling victim to an over-engagement with cyberspace. This is, for many people, a cause for anxiety.

Next month, the America Psychiatric Association will, for the first time, include Internet Addiction Disorder among its plethora of recognised conditions.

Meanwhile, psychologists already recognise Communication Addiction Disorder - a mental condition in which people feel compelled to be in constant contact with others, usually online, even when there is no practical reason for being so.

A global conference of psychiatrists meeting in Sydney a few years ago, announced ours to be the Age of Paranoia. Obviously, there will be many factors contributing to this, but our digital hyper-connectedness must surely be one.

When it comes to the internet, anxiety springs in part from a fear of being unable to switch off and, in some cases, a fear of missing something if we do. The latter is so prevalent among the young that MTV coined an acronym for it - FOMO, the Fear of Missing Out.

Sixty percent of Australian CEOs say they feel anxious because they cannot disconnect from work - they feel too coupled with their smart phones. Meanwhile, an estimated 40 percent of children in the UK who have a phone are sleep deprived.

If, as these and other statistics seem to suggest, overuse of the internet weakens our mental and emotional defences, we need to be very awake to the possibilities of revealing too much online.

The fact that paedophiles and child-pornographers use social networking sites to trawl for potential victims is already well known. They prey upon young people who have not yet learned that naiveté is unhelpful online or that privacy is a currency which must be dispensed very sparingly.

As human beings, our respect for privacy is in many ways a reflection of the esteem in which we hold our own individuality. The exceptionality of a human fingerprint or iris print represents a powerful symbol of the uniqueness of the person to whom they belong.