Dee Blind Mice

EFF: Breaking News

I just read chapters 5 & 6 of Solove’s The Digital Person. It’s about the limitations of the idea of the market providing adequate protection to people’s privacy. The idea that people don’t care about their personal information because they are prepared to sign it away for free is one of those disingenuous arguments that could only possibly be made by the very literal-minded or the very determined to get their hands on your information and not take any responsibility for it.

People have no choices when it comes to privacy policies – if they want to use the world wide web they are agreeing to privacy policies they haven’t even read just by clicking on a website. There is no appreciable difference between most privacy policies offered and they are long and hard to read and full of exceptions, making it virtually impossible for even the most time-rich and privacy-obsessed individual to know exactly what they are agreeing to when they give up their information.

Solove makes a case that the problem is architectural – i.e. that the way US bureaucracies are set up makes people vulnerable to identity theft. The solution to the risk of identity theft must come from changing the ways that information is gathered and used, not by treating an identity thief as a burglar who stole a TV.

I also read an article called “Congress Close to Establishing Rules for Driver’s Licenses” from the New York Times from last year. I guess it’s probably behind their sucky pay wall. Anyway, the interesting thing is that last year Congress tried to pass a bill regarding standardising Drivers’ Licenses that could be eventually be required by the Department of Homeland Security as a type of internal passport.

We were talking in class about the OnStar telematics system that could eventually send information from a crash to emergency services, the police, or (contentiously) insurance companies. It seems to me a good thing that the police have access to data like this when attempting to establish what happened during a car crash, but some of the others had concerns about this kind of “scientific” data being interpreted without any consideration of context.

I also read “Identity Chip Planted Under Skin Approved for Use in Health Care”, another NYT article from last year behind the pay wall. It’s pretty interesting, particularly in the light of Meghan Trainor’s thesis project from last year. I’ve heard Meghan talking about a lot of these issues – how much is possible and how much is not.

An interesting article by David Lazarus of The San Francisco Chronicle: “The Devil’s in phone bill details”. It’s from 2002 when PacBell notified its customers that it was going to share their information with all SBC subsidiaries unless they opted out by phone.

Another pay article from the Wall Street Journal from 2001: “Big Brother-in-Law”. This is interesting though – it’s about the ChoicePoint database and how goverment agencies including the FBI are using data collected about citizens to get around Privacy Act (1974).

Plus a module on Privacy in the Workplace from the Department of Cyberlaw at Harvard. Basically if you’re an employee you have no rights. But we all knew that. Your employer can spy on you even if they promise they won’t.

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