So this is what I’ve been reading about for Privacy class.
Still loving The Digital Person, Solove has a repect for literary metaphor that I really appreciate.
His argument is that the Big Brother paradigm has harmed conceptions of privacy because the real threat to privacy comes not from an organised totalitarian regime, but from decentralised, bureaucratic, careless, and uncontrolled forces collecting information about us over which we then have no control.
This is the Kafka metaphor – in The Trial Joseph K. comes up against an impersonal bureaucracy that is not particularly hostile to him, but which tells him he is being tried for a crime but won’t give him any information about what that is.
Kind of reminds me of National Security Letters. More on that later…
Here are the rest of the things we were looking at for this week:
California Department of Insurance Website Privacy Policy Notice
Dirty Laundry, Online for All to See – This is an article looking at what kinds of public information should be available online.
I also read “The Supreme Court’s Biggest Question” and “The Supreme Court’s Private Life” from the New York Times. These were both written in September during John Roberts’s confirmation as Chief Justice.
I’m very much a novice when it comes to understanding American law, but the idea that abortion rights are protected under privacy laws seems problematic to me. Or at least the idea that it’s the privacy to make the decision is problematic: surely one of the purposes of a legal system is to deny people choice over decisions the state has deemed unacceptable?
There again, privacy to make decisions that are not hurtful to others would certainly make sense in terms of privacy to make the decision to take drugs or commit suicide or choose to die. Whether or not abortion fits into this category is the nub of the whole moral argument surrounding it.
I could see abortion relating to privacy in the sense of privacy over what happens to one’s own body, and the right to be let alone physically. But does privacy relate to the body? It would seem that it should.
Also these links to some online Harvard Privacy Law classes. These are well worth looking at.
Data Profiling Introduction
Return to Privacy Module 1
