Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age (2007) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
Pages 1-16
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Sociological approaches to the study of privacy have emphasized the ways in which the collection and use of personal information have reflected and reinforced the relationships of power and influence between individuals, groups, and institutions within society.
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. The hardware underlying information technology has become vastly more powerful; advances in processor speed, memory sizes, disk storage capacity, and networking bandwidth allow data to be collected, stored, and analyzed in ways that were barely imaginable a decade ago.
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But the SARS outbreak in 2003 hinted at the potential for global pandemic on a very short time scale with some other disease, and measures to prevent pandemic outbreaks are receiving greater attention today. In the past, the Watergate scandals of 1972-1973, the Church Committee Hearings of 1976 (also known as the Hearings of the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities)
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While law enforcement authorities believe that it is helpful to know the identities of individuals interested in reading about terrorism or bomb making, librarians and many state legislatures are concerned about ensuring a free, unfettered, and unmonitored flow of information to all library patrons that could be jeopardized if individuals' reading habits are potentially the subject of government investigation or even monitoring. Surveillance by
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In some cases, careful design and planning will minimize the tradeoffs that are needed to attend to societal needs without compromising personal information. An example might be a design decision for a system to discard data immediately after it has been used for the purpose at hand -- in many instances, privacy concerns are strongly mitigated by the non-retention of data.
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That is, privacy is much more an issue of who is permitted to see an individual's personal information than of technologically restricting access to that information. People may be concerned about personal health and medical information being improperly disclosed, but this problem may arise at least as much as a result of policy decisions to make such information broadly accessible to relevant parties as from the activities of hackers breaking into medical databases.
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For example, a law enforcement agent may use a national criminal database to investigate an individual for personal reasons, in violation of departmental policy. In such instances, frequent audits to uncover improper access and penalties for improper access are essential elements of preventing such use.
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The library community has a long historical commitment to protecting the privacy of its patrons, formalized more than five decades ago and integrated into a core set of shared beliefs. This community was also an early adopter of information technology as a way of furthering its mission of offering full access to all information to libraries' patrons.
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Privacy tradeoffs related to each of these reasons are explored below. Economic Drivers A good example of how economic drivers affect privacy can be found in the area of the definition, protection, and enforcement of intellectual property rights in the networked digital environment.
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might have a dramatic impact on people's perceptions of their individual privacy. In the case of DRMTs, the economic benefit today arises not from the collection of this information about user behavior per se, but from the primary applications of DRMTs to charge fees for various services for access to protected materials (printing, storage, multiple simultaneous access, and so on)
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Privacy issues arise in the health and medical domain primarily as the result of a concern about the consequences should personal health and medical information be disclosed or disclosable. One source of concern is social -- there is stigma associated with certain medical conditions, and disclosure of those conditions potentially subjects individuals with them to discrimination and to being socially ostracized.
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Second, government knowledge about certain activities often has a chilling effect on such activities, even if such activities are entirely legal -- an example might be planning a public protest about government action. Third, many individuals do not want government authorities to collect personal information simply on the theory that such collection raises their profile and makes it more likely that they might be erroneously singled out in some manner to their detriment even if they have done nothing illegal.
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In addition, technology-based privacy enhancement rests on firmer ground to the extent that technologists attend to privacy considerations throughout the life cycle of personal information that is collected rather than just at the beginning of the collection process. The committee is concerned about the nature of public debates about privacy and its relationship to other societal interests.
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The committee offers a number of concrete recommendations to enhance the effectiveness of privacy policies. Specifically, organizations with self-regulatory privacy policies should take both technical and administrative measures to ensure their enforcement, routinely test whether their stated privacy policies are being fully implemented, produce privacy impact assessments when they are appropriate, strengthen their privacy policy by establishing a mechanism for recourse if an individual or a group believes that they have been treated in a manner inconsistent with an organization's stated policy, and establish an institutional advocate for privacy.
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Accordingly, the committee recommends that governments at various levels should establish formal mechanisms for the institutional advocacy of privacy within government, and furthermore that a national privacy commissioner or standing privacy commission should be established to provide ongoing and periodic assessments of privacy developments. Finally, the committee found that the availability of individual recourse for recognized violations of privacy is an essential element of public policy regarding privacy.
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