The movie “In Time” depicts a society where time is the uniform currency and a person’s lifespan is determined by how much time they have. An important question that arises from the movie is the extent of privacy a person has. Considering privacy to be important for one’s freedom and protection against exploitation from others, the movie has various examples of privacy being exploited.
Another example of privacy violation is the public display of peoples time on their wrists. This allows any person to have access to your welath, and we see discrimination and violance as a result of this information being public. The wealthy have the ability to hoard money, and raise the prices in the lowest region, killing people off to give themselves more. This can be seen as exploiting the poor’s privacy as they do not have control over their own lives due to the scarcity of time they have. In the poorest zones, violence runs rampant. People are scared for their lives of a local gang who will routinely round citizens up and steal whatever time they have left. The time keepers do not bother to stop the crime in the lower zones because they are seen as less important. These examples serve to be important when we consider privacy, showing the extreme consequences if we live in a world where some of the most important information is public for all to see.
Ethical Analysis through Social Contract Theory of the public display of information deems that this is unethical. The decision for the time currency to be on your arm and visible to the public makes peoples lives worse. They can be publically judged and discriminated against based on their wealth and an excess of wealth can put people in harms way. Individuals do not have a choice of whether to display their currencies. With every individual already having this publically displayed in the movie, we see extreme inequality and violence in poorer regions where people stuggle to survive. [1]
[1] Michael J. Quinn, "Ethics for the information age 8th Edition", (Pearson 2019)