stefan brandt's List: Privacy and Data Protection re Social Networking

• there is no single definition or analysis or meaning of the term
• the concept has historical origins in well known philosophical discussions, most notably Aristotle's distinction between the public sphere of political activity and the private sphere associated with family and domestic life.
• there remains confusion over the meaning, value and scope of the concept of privacy.
• Philosophical debates concerning definitions of privacy became prominent in the second half of the twentieth century, and are deeply affected by the development of privacy protection in the law. Some defend privacy as focusing on control over information about oneself (Parent, 1983), while others defend it as a broader concept required for human dignity (Bloustein, 1964), or crucial for intimacy (Gerstein, 1978; Inness, 1992).
• Other commentators defend privacy as necessary for the development of varied and meaningful interpersonal relationships (Fried, 1970, Rachels, 1975), or as the value that accords us the ability to control the access others have to us (Gavison, 1980; Allen, 1988; Moore, 2003), or as a set of norms necessary not only to control access but also to enhance personal expression and choice (Schoeman, 1992), or some combination of these (DeCew, 1997).
• (1) the historical roots of the concept of privacy, including the development of privacy protection in tort and constitutional law, and the philosophical responses that privacy is merely reducible to other interests or is a coherent concept with fundamental value, (2) the critiques of privacy as a right, (3) the wide array of philosophical definitions or defenses of privacy as a concept, providing alternative views on the meaning and value of privacy (and whether or not it is culturally relative), as well as (4) the challenges to privacy posed in an age of technological advance.
• Margaret Mead and other anthropologists have demonstrated the ways various cultures protect privacy through concealment, seclusion or by restricting access to secret ceremonies (Mead, 1949). Alan Westin (1967) has surveyed studies of animals demonstrating that a desire for privacy is not restricted to humans.
• Privacy can refer to a sphere separate from government, a domain inappropriate for governmental interference, forbidden views and knowledge, solitude, or restricted access, to list just a few.
• Reductionism vs. Coherentism
• reductionists, for they view what are called privacy concerns as analyzable or reducible to claims of other sorts, such as infliction of emotional distress or property interests. They deny that there is anything useful in considering privacy as a separate concept. They conclude, then, that there is nothing coherent, distinctive or illuminating about privacy interests.

• Thomson's Reductionism

    

    Probably the most famous reductionist view of privacy is one from Judith Jarvis Thomson (1975). Noting that there is little agreement on what privacy is, Thomson examines a number of cases that have been thought to be violations of the right to privacy. On closer inspection, however, Thomson believes all those cases can be adequately and equally well explained in terms of violations of property rights or rights over the person, such as a right not to be listened to. Ultimately the right to privacy, on Thomson's view, is merely a cluster of rights. Those rights in the cluster are always overlapped by, and can be fully explained by, property rights or rights to bodily security. The right to privacy, on her view, is “derivative” in the sense that there is no need to find what is common in the cluster of privacy rights. Privacy is derivative in its importance and justification, according to Thomson, as any privacy violation is better understood as the violation of a more basic right. Numerous commentators provide strong arguments against Thomson's critique (Scanlon, 1975; Inness, 1992).
• Alan Westin describes privacy as the ability to determine for ourselves when, how, and to what extent information about us is communicated to others (Westin, 1967).
• Alan Westin describes privacy as the ability to determine for ourselves when, how, and to what extent information about us is communicated to others (Westin, 1967).
• Austin, L., 2003, “Privacy and the Question of Technology”, Law and Philosophy 22, 2:119-166
• DeCew, J., 1997, In Pursuit of Privacy: Law, Ethics, and the Rise of Technology, Ithaca: Cornell University Press
• –––, 2003, “Privacy: Its Meaning and Value” American Philosophical Quarterly 40: 215-227
• Rachels, J., 1975, “Why Privacy is Important”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 4: 323-33
• There are massive databases and Internet records of information about individual financial and credit history, medical records, purchases and telephone calls, for example, and most people do not know what information is stored about them or who has access to it. The ability for others to access and link the databases, with few controls on how they use, share, or exploit the information, makes individual control over information about oneself more difficult than ever before.
• Warren, S. and Brandeis, L., 1890, “The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law Review 4: 193-220.
• Online Guide to Privacy Resources,  (Electronic Privacy Information Center, Marc Rotenberg, ed.)
• Moore (2000) argues that views which trade privacy for security typically strike the wrong balance and in many cases undermine both (Moore, 2000).
• Westin, A., 1967, Privacy and Freedom, New York: Atheneum

20 more annotations...

• Protection of Personal Information Act

• Information protection is an aspect of safeguarding a person’s right to privacy.
• South African legislation which recognises the principle of protecting personal information including the Promotion of Access to Information Act , the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act and the National Credit Act.
• The right to privacy is not absolute. As a common law right of personality, it is limited by the legitimate interests of others and the public interest. As a constitutional right, it is limited by section 36, i.e. the law of general application which includes other fundamental rights. Thus, any privacy legislation must find the balance between the individuals’ right to privacy and other people’s legitimate need to obtain information about the individual. These balancing needs may be based on the right to choose one’s trade, occupation or profession freely, the right of access to information and the right to freedom of expression.

1 more annotation...

• Electronic Privacy Information Center
• American Civil Liberties Union
• Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email
• Access Reports. A biweekly newsletter covering the Freedom of Information Act, other federal open government statutes, and information policy issues on both the legislative and administrative level.
• Privacy Journal. A monthly journal on privacy, mainly in the U.S., now in its 24th year of publication.

3 more annotations...

• Privacy in Social Network Sites
• Social Network Sites (SNS) are websites that allow users to upload information to a public profile, create a list of online friends, and browse the profiles of other users of the SNS. The websites have membership rules and community standards. Users disclose identity-relevant information via their profile to others. This information is either referential, directly referring to a person, or attributive, describing attributes to the data subject. Although most laws and regulations restrict the access to referential information, attributive information is not protected as such. However, the aggregation of large amounts of attributive information on SNS profiles poses new privacy risks.
• Information spreads faster through a Social Network Sites than through a real-life network.
• Social Network Sites have financial incentives to generate revenues from the information users upload
• The most common way to achieve this is to create marketing profiles of users and serve them with targeted ads.
• digital files of users are maintained that try to resemble the real person as closely as possible. Other users can contribute to this profile by uploading photos or text about the users, often without the user’s informed consent. This raises serious questions about the user’s control over his own identity-relevant information and his ability to construct his own moral identity within a SNS
• A fourth reason to restrict access to the information is the prevention of information-based harm.
• activities that harm users are grouped into information collection, information processing and information dissemination.
• Social Network Sites track the activity of their users on their own websites and those of their marketing partners.
• able to gather unprecedented amounts of secondary personal information on their users, sometimes even without the informed consent of the users
• Studies for the United States government have shown that it is easy to collect data from public Internet sources as SNS and connect them to existing government databases. This could lead to the chilling of free speech with respect to political dissidents.
• information on the websites can also easily be used to damage someone’s reputation,
• users have minimal information and no control over secondary use of their information, the selling of their information or the disclosure of their information to groups unwanted, by the SNS. Above all, others can post information about the user, which can only be deleted after the fact, if possible at all. Information is posted about non-users, but they can not delete this, unless they become members.
• Harmful activities should be grouped into information collection, processing and dissemination and harm should  be defined by the four moral reasons to restrict access to identity-relevant information: information-based harm, informational inequality, information injustice and the inability to define one’s own moral identity.

12 more annotations...

• In a class project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that received some attention last year, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree analyzed more than 4,000 Facebook profiles of students, including links to friends who said they were gay. The pair was able to predict, with 78 percent accuracy, whether a profile belonged to a gay male.

   So far, this type of powerful data mining, which relies on sophisticated statistical correlations, is mostly in the realm of university researchers, not identity thieves and marketers.

• You may not disclose personal information, but your online friends and colleagues may do it for you, referring to your school or employer, gender, location and interests. Patterns of social communication, researchers say, are revealing.

   “Personal privacy is no longer an individual thing,” said Harold Abelson, the computer science professor at M.I.T. “In today’s online world, what your mother told you is true, only more so: people really can judge you by your friends.”
• Collected together, the pool of information about each individual can form a distinctive “social signature,” researchers say.
• Even more unnerving to privacy advocates is the work of two researchers from Carnegie Mellon University. In a paper published last year, Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross reported that they could accurately predict the full, nine-digit Social Security numbers for 8.5 percent of the people born in the United States between 1989 and 2003 — nearly five million individuals.
• More generally, privacy advocates worry that the new frontiers of data collection, brokering and mining, are largely unregulated. They fear “online redlining,” where products and services are offered to some consumers and not others based on statistical inferences and predictions about individuals and their behavior.

3 more annotations...