My del.icio.us
End of Privacy
I finished reading The Digital Person by Daniel Solove. The last section is all about government access to information stored by private companies. Database firms like ChoicePoint are making electronic profiles of us that they will sell to anyone prepared to pay for this data. Federal Agencies can buy information from ChoicePoint that they are prevented by law from gathering themselves. The government and big businesses are essentially colluding to deny us our privacy rights and any control over our own information.
I also read a superb article by David Lyon called “Everyday Surveillance: Personal data and social classifications”. He outlines the reasons we are so dependent on surveillance and looks at the possible implications for a society that classifies its citizens based on constant monitoring. A must-read for anyone interested in this stuff.
In “Privacy as a Common Good in the Digital World” Priscilla Regan argues that cyberspace is a commons and that privacy is a common good. I’m not convinced by the argument that personal information is a common pool resource because I don’t think it is in any way analogous to water or grazing pastures in that it’s not really something we all share in that kind of way. However I think her insight that privacy is something that needs to be tackled collectively is a sound one.
A Wall Street Journal article from 2001 (that you have to pay for unfortunately - you’d think after four years they could let it go) “The Privacy Officer: What’s standing between your personal information and the world? People like Benjamin E. Robinson III” describes the phenomenon whereby companies hire someone to cover their arses privacy-wise. Obviously if a company hires someone to protect my data they will totally have my best interests at heart. Sigh.
Also in the WSJ “Big Brother-in-Law: If the FBI hopes to get the goods on you, it may ask ChoicePoint”, again from 2001 and again paid. This is a really interesting article though if you can get your hands on it.
Final pay link, but Dan Savage’s Can I Get a Little Privacy? from November 16th is one of the recent articles about privacy to cause a stir online. He proposes a constitutional amendment guaranteeing privacy. I’m wary of this as a solution. It seems to me that privacy is a natural right and not something that needs to be explicitly granted by a constitution and that once you do that you could end up going places you never wanted to. Change constitutions at your peril. Learn from Ireland’s embarrassing and misogynistic mistakes.
I wrote my paper for Embedding Privacy: The Identity Fraud Fraud
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