Privacy, Option Value, and Feedback by Wendy Seltzer. We have confused intuitions about privacy in public. Sometimes we say “if you don’t want something known, don’t say or post it where anyone can see,” even while, at other times, we recognize the more fluid nature of privacy and the value of semi-public space. Over time, we construct privacy-preserving fixes in architecture, norms, and law: we build walls and windowshades; develop understandings of friendship, trust, and confidentiality; and protect some of these boundaries with the Fourth Amendment, statute, regulation, tort, and contract. The environment provides feedback mechanisms, enabling us to adapt to the disclosure problems we experience (individually or societally). We move conversations inside, scold or drop untrustworthy friends, rewrite statutes. Technological change throws our intuitions off when we don’t see privacy impacts on a meaningful timescale.
This article aims to do three things: 1. Finally, privacy-feedback takes a larger systemic role. Privacy in Academia ? February 18 2011. Neil Richards on Why Video Privacy Matters. Our guest blogger Neil Richards, a Professor of Law at Washington University School of Law, turns his sights on video privacy in this guest blog post. It whets our appetite for his forthcoming book on Intellectual Privacy. So here is Professor Richards’s post: The House of Representatives recently passed an amendment to a fairly obscure a law known as the Video Privacy Protection Act.
This law protects the privacy of our video rental records. It ensures that companies who have information about what videos we watch keep them confidential, and it requires them to get meaningful consent from us before they publish them. What’s at stake is something privacy scholars call “intellectual privacy” – the idea that records of our reading habits, movie watching habits, and private conversations deserve special protection from other kinds of personal information. For generations, librarians have understood this. Q&A: How Do You Define ‘Privacy Harm’? - Digits. Banking on Our Privacy. Privacy is something we lose actively, not passively. Listen to the verbs of our digital lives: We browse the web and Google.We tweet and Twitter.We socially connect and Facebook.We move around the world as mayors on Foursquare. We charge our purchases on credit cards. We share our favorite places to dine, shop and travel on Blippy. Monthly all of this financial activity aggregates to us as a one-way mirror on PageOnce and Mint (now Intuit), disembodied from the holistic view the world at large sees of us.
Did we really think the Internet/Web was free? Companies like RapLeaf, are aggregating our digital lives to see what the holistic sense of it means for businesses. This data in its aggregate form poses a unique opportunity and source of confusion for banks and financial institutions. Should a banker decide whether you're a good credit risk because your Facebook or LinkedIn friends seem to be? And what of geospatial identity? Comparing Freedom of Speech Protection and European Data Protection.