Digital Dossiers

For Embedding Privacy we had to read “Privacy and the Private States” by Janna Malamud Smith. It looks at the states of privacy, as name by Alan Westin: solitude, anonymity, reserve, and intimacy. It’s not earth-shattering, but puts some of the main issues with privacy into some kind of order. As we discovered at the first class, it’s quite difficult to really describe what privacy is in any logically consistent way. It’s an idea that seems to rely as much on feeling as on reasoning.

We also read the first two chapters of Daniel Solove’s The Digital Person. I really like this book. It’s the kind of read that could easily make you into a paranoid wreck. He writes about the digital dossiers that are kept on everybody who takes part in the world either as a citizen or a consumer. It’s very weighted towards the USA, where it’s perfectly legal for government agencies to sell data to businesses. Interesting insights into something I knew about, but wasn’t quite au fait with the specifics.