Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age (2007) / Chapter Skim
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Part II: The Backdrop for Privacy, 2 Intellectual Approaches and Conceptual Underpinnings
Part II: The Backdrop for Privacy, 2 Intellectual Approaches and Conceptual Underpinnings
Pages 55-87
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From page 55... ...
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 relations of power and influence between individuals, groups, and institutions within society. That there is such a multiplicity of legitimate intellectual approaches to the study of privacy suggests that no one discipline captures, or can capture, the richness and texture of its various nuances, and what appear at first to be very slight or subtle differences turn out to have deep implications in practice.
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From page 56... ...
add to this patchwork but do not rationalize it. Finally, in a global economy, the need to conduct commerce across international borders suggests that the United States cannot ignore foreign law regarding privacy -- and foreign law regarding privacy is often much more comprehensive than domestic law.
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From page 57... ...
Supreme Court has held that a right to choose an abortion or to receive information about contraceptives is founded on privacy protections implied in the Constitution. The discussion below is not intended to address these non-informational dimensions of privacy and mentions them only in passing as they may help to illuminate some of the issues surrounding the notion of privacy and the ethical and moral dimensions of the general privacy debate.
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From page 58... ...
Further, normative accounts of privacy may depend on subtle differences in the descriptive analysis that are either stated or presumed, and that can be masked if the two tasks are intertwined. So, for example, a descriptive account of privacy may show that there are cases where privacy conflicts with other values.
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From page 59... ...
2.1.2 Privacy as Control Versus Privacy as Restricted Access The most common descriptive accounts of privacy reflect two basic views: (1) privacy as restrictions on the access of other people to an individual's personal information and (2)
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From page 60... ...
In his survey research, Westin has suggested that Americans hold differing views regarding the value of certain aspects of privacy. For example, based on his analysis of surveys over a number of years, he groups consumers into one of three categories: • Priacy fundamentalists -- those who reject trading information for special offers, who prefer only opt-in approaches, and who would prefer to see more legislative approaches to privacy protection; • Priacy unconcerned -- consumers who are comfortable with trading their information for almost any consumer value; and • Priacy pragmatists -- people who take time to weigh the benefits and risks associated with providing their personal information.
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From page 61... ...
At one extreme is the position that says that all that needs to be controlled is information about the individual per se (e.g., health status)
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From page 62... ...
.8 University of Pennsylvania professor of law Anita Allen's early work distinguished among informational privacy (limited access to information, confidentiality, secrecy, anonymity, and data protection) , physical privacy (limited access to persons, possessions, and personal property)
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From page 63... ...
New York University professor of culture and communication Helen Nissenbaum's approach to privacy is based on the idea that social norms governing information flow depend on context.13 A judgment that a given action or practice violates privacy is a function of the context in which the activity takes place, what type of information is in question, and the social roles of the people involved. Social contexts, such as health care, education, commerce, religion, and so on, are governed by complex social norms, including informational norms that specify the principles of transmission governing the flow of information.
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From page 64... ...
Under certain circumstances, norms may be revisited and revised: critical events, such as the September 11 attacks, may demand a revision of informational norms governing public spaces; the outbreak of an epidemic may demand that norms of information flow in the medical health care context be revisited; emergence of online dating might also result in a shift of the norms governing information flow. Nevertheless, a systematic and comprehensive strategy for evaluating whether change should be resisted or embraced starts with the important first step of revealing how, if at all, standing norms have been breached or are threatened.
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From page 65... ...
; • The direction of a personal border crossing (compare taking information from a person as with drug testing or a photo with imposing information on a person as with spam or subliminal sounds) ; • The type of personal information involved (contrast a general characteristic such as gender or age with information that may be stigmatizing, intimate, and/or offer a unique and locatable identity)
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From page 66... ...
The challenges posed for privacy in the information age -- by technological advancement, societal shifts, and critical or signal events -- fall squarely within the scope of most dominant accounts of privacy and do not require resolution of some of the more difficult conceptual questions concerning the full scope or borders of the concept. 2.1.4 Normative Theories of Privacy The philosophical works that attempt to characterize the concept of privacy see that activity as necessary for addressing the important normative questions surrounding privacy.
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From page 67... ...
Another instrumentalist view holds that the value of privacy is derived from the fact that privacy contributes to fairness. It is because of privacy that we can ensure a level playing field in the information that is known by each of the two parties in an interaction.
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From page 68... ...
Etzioni's view holds that if the price society sometimes pays for individual privacy were clearer, privacy would be given less importance by society. Similar arguments are set forth by Anita Allen-Castellito, who suggests that individuals are "accountable" to a number of "others" including employers, family members, and in some instances, members of a racial or ethnic group.16 Accountability means that we may reasonably be expected to "answer for" our behavior to others with whom we have a meaningful relationship.
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From page 69... ...
2.2 ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES ON PRIVACY17 2.2.1 The Rationale for an Economic Perspective on Privacy Normative discussions of privacy emphasize the notion of privacy as something of value, which has led some to attempt to look at privacy through the lens of economic theory. Rather than philosophizing about what societal values are being balanced, an economic perspective on privacy regards privacy as something that people value in varying degrees under varying circumstances (Box 2.1)
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From page 70... ...
For example, one long-running debate concerns using "opt-in" or "opt-out" approaches for permitting the sharing of consumer information among organizations. (Opt-in regimes do not collect information unless the individual explicitly takes steps to allow it; opt-out regimes collect information unless the individual explicitly takes steps to disallow it.)
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From page 71... ...
The sections below describe four economic perspectives on privacy: a "privacy as fraud" perspective, a perspective based on assigning to individuals the property rights to their personal information, a perspective based on regulation, and a perspective based on behavioral economics. 2.2.2 Privacy as Fraud First appearing in the late 1970s, one school of thought about the economics of privacy asserts that government facilitates the free flow of personal information for commercial uses in the interests of promoting and maximizing market efficiency.19 In this view, both consumers and sellers benefit: consumers benefit when sellers have access to useful information about them, and sellers benefit from being able to get the best return on their advertising or marketing approaches and ultimately make more sales.
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From page 72... ...
For example, Odlyzko describes how one computer manufacturer offered the same system for sale to small businesses, health care companies, and state and local governments at respectively lower prices.21 In addition, this approach can also lead to certain external effects that consumers often view as undesirable. Indeed, many consumers perceive unsolicited marketing appeals of a type enabled by the sharing of information (e.g., an unsolicited phone call about a tailored golfing vacation package when one has no interest whatsoever in a golfing vacation)
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From page 73... ...
2.2.3 Privacy and the Assignment of Property Rights to Individuals After the initial economic analyses in the late 1970s and 1980s, privacy reappeared in the economic literature in the mid-1990s,26 as the "dot-com" IT sector expanded and markets for personal information grew. In these analyses, assignment of property rights to information was proposed as one way to control or improve the use of personal information:27 consumers would "own" their personal information and would be free to share it in whatever manner they chose.
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From page 74... ...
To protect privacy in such settings, it may be necessary that public policy make it mandatory for everyone to remain silent about their personal information. 2.2.4 The Economic Impact of Privacy Regulation Whereas the assignment of property rights can have value in resolving privacy issues in contexts where the collectors and users of personal information and the information owners can enter into contractual arrangements, there are many situations in which such contractual arrangements are difficult to manage.
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From page 75... ...
Behavioral economics seeks to integrate insights from psychology with neoclassical economic theory and to understand the economic implications of behavior that does not conform to the calculating, unemotional, utility-maximizing characteristics of Homo economicus. In a privacy context, it has been observed that despite consumer concern about privacy, survey results point to broad discrepancies between 29Although private contracts can represent a stronger commitment than does public policy (which can be unilaterally changed)
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From page 76... ...
32 Recent work by Acquisti is illustrative, offering an explanation for the well-known discrepancy between individuals' attitudes and their behavior when it comes to online privacy.33 Acquisti argues that contrary to traditional economic analyses that assume that individuals are fully rational, forward-looking, Bayesian updaters who take into account how current behavior will influence their future well-being and preferences, individuals instead demonstrate various forms of psychological inconsistencies (self-control problems, hyperbolic discounting, present-biases)
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From page 77... ...
Combining these two sets of factors reveals broader consequences for individual privacy protection. Acquisti suggests that individuals tend to dismiss possible future consequences of revealing personal information for an immediate reward, but also lack complete information to grasp the magnitude of the risk -- because each instance of revealing personal information can be linked together, resulting in "a whole that is more than the sum of its parts." Acquisti concludes that more attention will have to be paid to behavioral responses to privacy protections, rather than focusing on protecting privacy solely through informational awareness and industry self-regulation.
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From page 78... ...
Hui and Png go on to suggest that consumers often attach a high price to their personal information when discussing privacy and personal information, but often readily part with their personal information "in exchange for even small rewards or incentives."36 Finally, the findings of behavioral economics have implications for the various critiques of how fair information principles have been implemented in the United States.37 At the heart of these critiques is the oftexpressed concern that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) , the government agency with responsibility for the protection of certain privacy rights, at least for consumers in the United States, has compressed these fair information practices into a limited construct referred to as "notice and choice." Most often, the provision of notice is satisfied by largely unintelligible industrial sector "boilerplate" language that is not subject to review by the FTC, and the default choice is framed in terms of consumers' opting out of some subcomponent as standard business practice, unless specific legislation establishes informed affirmative consent as the default.38 Behavioral economics thus implies that a default opt-out choice will not result in a regime that would be affirmatively chosen under a default opt-in choice.
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From page 79... ...
Surveillance from this perspective is generally understood to refer to the systematic observation of individuals undertaken in an effort to facilitate their management and control. Some scholars concerned with surveillance emphasize the ways in which surveillance technology has changed over time, while others focus on the ways in which old and new surveillance techniques are used in the exercise of control over individuals in their roles as employees, consumers, and citizens.
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From page 80... ...
He integrates a number of insights from an evolving cultural studies tradition to study that which is referred to as the postmodern condition. He provides examples to illustrate the ways in which "dataveillance," or the analysis of transaction-generated data, reduces the need for access to a physical or material body in order to gather information and intelligence about the past, present, or future behavior of data subjects.42 Priscilla M
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From page 81... ...
48 Stephen T Margulis, "On the Status and Contribution of Westin's and Altman's Theories of Privacy," Journal of Social Issues 59(2)
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From page 82... ...
To approach the topic using only the language of privacy is to miss some of the pressing social, ethical, and political issues raised by contemporary surveillance. Alternatively, one might formulate issues of human dignity, equal opportunity, social justice, and racial parity as being some of the areas in which societal or group harms may result from a loss of (individual)
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From page 83... ...
Also relevant is S Alpert, "Protecting Medical Privacy: Challenges in the Age of Genetic Information," Journal of Social Issues 59(2)
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From page 84... ...
2.4 AN INTEGRATING PERSPECTIVE The discussion above of philosophical, economic, and sociological perspectives on privacy indicates that understanding privacy in the information age requires consideration of a variety of approaches, methods, and ideas. Taken as a whole, the privacy literature is a cacophony, suggesting that trying to define privacy in the abstract is not likely to be a fruitful exercise.
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From page 85... ...
However, knowing the relevant dimensions of privacy and what "more" or "less" privacy might mean in the specific context of each dimension does clarify the discussion, and the anchoring vignette technique is one useful approach to obtain such knowledge. The context-sensitive nature of privacy makes it clear that questions about privacy necessarily imply specifying privacy "from whom," "about what," "for what reasons," and "under what conditions." For example, a set of possible privacy violators might include one's employer; family; friends, acquaintances, and neighbors; researchers; businesses; and government.
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From page 86... ...
as a possible privacy violator, one might be concerned about surveillance of work or about drug testing. By contrast, in the context of friends, acquaintances, and neighbors as possible privacy violators, one might be concerned about personal secrets, nudity, sex, medical information, and invasiveness.56 The kinds of social roles and relationships involved are as central as 56 In thinking through who might be a possible privacy violator, it also helps to consider parties with whom one might be willing to share information.
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From page 87... ...
A related set of questions involves the circumstances under which privacy can be seen to go too far. Under some conditions the failure to discover or reveal personal information can be harmful socially (e.g., in the case of potential for exposure to deadly contagious diseases or a person with a history of violent and abusive behavior)
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