There is an interesting post over at Slashdot right now, and while it is addressed at copyright issues I think that it can profitably be thought about in terms of privacy as well. In the post, we read:
In 2005, a college student published a rant on her hometown on her MySpace page, beginning with, “The older I get, the more I realize how much I despise Coalinga.” Her former high school principal found the rant while browsing her MySpace page (what?), and forwarded it to the town newspaper, which published the “rant” without the girl’s permission, signed with her full name, as a letter to the editor (what?). The resulting fallout included death threats against the family and the closure of the 20-year-old business owned by the girl’s father. Four years later, a judge ruled that the girl could not sue for “public disclosure of private facts” because the MySpace post was not private.
I ask you: did the judge rule ‘properly’, that is, per our understandings of privacy was this young woman’s privacy violated/compromised/etc. when her writings were repurposed and published in a local paper? Should this republication merely be treated as a copyright issue, not for strategic reasons but simply because there is no privacy issue being raised?
Posted in Discussion Piece.
Below is the introduction from my module 1 paper. I invite you to read it here (paper is available here). Comments are welcome!
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The development of privacy theories has been predominantly tied to North American legal theoretical traditions. From Warren and Brandeis’ (1890) pioneering ‘Right to Privacy’, Alan Westin’s (1967) claims of informational privacy, to Richard Posner’s (1978) understanding of privacy on economic-institutionalist terms, these cornerstones of privacy thought all maintain close ties with their liberal-democratic legal and economic foundations.
It comes as little surprise, then, that theories of privacy have rarely been explored through the epistemological lineages of European social theory. Indeed, social theory of all forms is underrepresented in the realm of privacy. Accordingly, this paper takes up the opportunity to bridge privacy literatures with European social theory. Helen Nissenbaum’s notion of “privacy as contextual integrity” provides an excellent entry point for an exploration of privacy through the lens of social and political philosophy.
Nissenbaum does not seek to develop a full theory of privacy; rather, she provides a theoretical account of a right to privacy as it applies to the cultural values of information sharing between individuals. Nissenbaum’s argument borrows heavily from Pierre Bourdieu’s trademark social theoretical concepts of social space as field, domains and contexts (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). On this basis, Nissenbaum’s argument is more concerned with the spatially bounded normative implications of information exchange and how normative positions concerning privacy are themselves culturally produced, stratified, differentiated, and also (crucially) context-specific.
In addressing the underrepresentation of social theory in privacy literatures, this paper engages in a critical social theoretical analysis of Helen Nissenbaum’s notion of privacy as “contextual integrity”. I begin with a brief summary of Helen Nissenbaum’s idea of “privacy as contextual integrity,” drawing significantly on social theoretical ideas of context, spheres, or fields. This section details the two main normative principles that Nissenbaum argues regulate acceptable modes and practices of informational exchange. Continued…
Posted in Papers, Session One.
I recently came across a nice article on data mining (if you wanted to get a rapid overview) that I thought I’d share with all of us. Michael Seringhaus’ and Mark Gerstein’ ‘The Privacy Crunch‘ reads as follows;
Some questions shouldn’t be asked. Employers, for instance, generally are not allowed to discriminate based on marital status, sexual orientation and so on. But our growing digital footprint is threatening our ability to dodge inappropriate inquiries. Through data mining, employers, insurers, advertisers and others can infer the answers to private questions without even asking.
They need two things: a heap of personal data, and the techniques to crunch it. Both are readily available.
Continued…
Posted in Session Two.
[Note - I preface this with the following: what follows is a non-lawyer's ruminations of how the Supreme Court's thoughts on reasonable expectations to privacy intersect with what deep packet inspection (DPI) can potentially do. This is not meant to be a detailed examination of particular network appliances with particular characteristics, but much, much more general in nature.]
Whereas Kyllo v. United States saw the US Supreme Court assert that thermal-imaging devices, when directed towards citizens’ homes, did constitute an invasion of citizens’ privacy, the corresponding Canadian case (R. v. Tessling) saw the Supreme Court assert that RCMP thermal imaging devices did not violate Canadians’ Section 8 Chart rights (“Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure”). The Court’s conclusions emphasized information privacy interests at the expense of normative expectations – thermal information, on its own, was practically ‘meaningless’ – which has led Ian Kerr and Jena McGill to worry that informational understandings of privacy invoke:
. . . a mesmerizing sleight of hand through which our minds are misdirected away from police choppers slashing through the night and patrol dogs perambulating corridors – these things no longer qualifying as searches – towards an extremely impersonal, non-social and merely informational scientific account of heat emanating from a building or odours emanating from luggage ( Kerr and McGill 2007: 407).
In an era where datamining is an incredibly profitable market, and where individual data fragments on their own are practically meaningless (Daniel Solove has suggested that they are like the points in a Seurat painting), what does adopting an informational account towards privacy mean for securing packets from police surveillance practices? Do we have a reasonable expectation that the packets that stream to and from our computers – including those packets that applications generate and receive without our knowing in the background of typical computer uses – should be considered private? Continued…
Posted in Discussion Piece, Session Two.
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