Splicetoday

Digital
Aug 26, 2008, 09:14AM

Understanding Privacy

An op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal argues that we've gotten over privacy as a society because most people willingly give away personal information online. After all, do we really care about privacy if we let Amazon track our book preferences? Author Daniel Solove offers an emphatic rebuttal, pointing out that privacy in the digital age is less about the information we share, and more about what is done with that information once it's in the hands of a third party.

Crovitz makes a common argument -- that the fact that people express concern over their privacy but do little to protect it demonstrates that they could really care less about privacy. In my book, Understanding Privacy, I argue that this reasoning is flawed. People might be generally concerned about their privacy but not realize the specific ways that their personal information will be used when they give it out. People give out bits of data here and there, and each individual disclosure to one particular entity might be relatively innocuous.

The fact that entities have information about us doesn't mean that we don't view privacy as valuable. First of all, Crovitz assumes that privacy is about hiding away our information from everybody but ourselves. But this is a far too narrow way to understand privacy. In Understanding Privacy, I argue that "privacy" is not just one thing, but a group of related things. For example, there are many privacy problems that Crovitz overlooks in his analysis. It's true, for example, that Amazon records our tastes in books. I shop on Amazon.com and I like its book recommendation service. But does that mean that I don't care about my privacy? Far from it. I would be upset if Amazon kept the data insecure, if it didn't inform me of the data it had, if it disclosed it to the government without my consent, if it started posting my book purchases online for the world to see, and so on.

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