Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide'
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
1. The "if you have nothing to hide..." line is predicated on the viewer having final say about whether something is right/wrong, thus subordinating the subject to the viewer. This is repulsive to the notion of liberty as protected by the American "4th Amendment" right of freedom from governmental inspection without an adjudicated warrant. To wit: it's not that I have something to hide, it's that someone else is going to be obnoxious if they see it.
On a related but semantically distinct note...
2. Those pushing "if you have nothing to hide..." have suspect & ulterior motives. Their existence (income, job, power, prestige) depend on finding something "wrong". They are, by job description, hostile to me. If they derived nothing from inspecting others, they would not care whether anything was hidden or not. Remember: they seek the power to punish, not just what they find wrong, but what they cannot inspect. Your exposure nets you little, but gains them so much they want to reprimand you for any concealment.
The problem is both senior's prejudices, AND the fact that he's missing context. Junior might be watching an instructional video. It might be a break after 10 hours straight work. He might be creating videos for the company and uploading them.
In other words, just because you have nothing to hide doesn't mean someone who looks is going to see the whole true picture.
Anyone who's sat on either side of the table as a lawyer questions a witness will know how a selective editing of the truth can shade decisions. Reality TV shows and 60 Minutes have along, long history (and they're hardly the only ones) of shooting a great deal of footage, then splicing and editing it together in a way as to tell the story they want to tell.
This is part of a larger topic I'm starting to formulate about power. The key in power isn't to have more total resources than the other side, but to identify the key points from which you can control the outcome. William Gibson noted that the future isn't evenly distributed. Neither are are power and control points.
"They [privacy problems] affect the power relationships between people and the institutions of the modern state. They not only frustrate the individual by creating a sense of helplessness and powerlessness, but also affect social structure by altering the kind of relationships people have with the institutions that make important decisions about their lives."
"Nothing to hide" is thematically similar to the groan-inducing "Do you want the terrorists to win?" arguments against civil liberties, in favor of increased security measures, proferred and popularly supported in the mid-2000s. (Sadly, many of the legacies and artifacts of that position still persist).
The answer to any of these half-baked arguments should always begin with something along the lines of "Because we're better than that." Because we have a constitution that assumes we're good people, and that protects our civil liberties from invasion. Because these things are so fundamental to our nation's purpose that giving them up is much worse than being attacked. Giving them up threatens the very purpose of the country's founding.
Even to entertain these arguments, i.e., by trying to cite examples of areas of privacy or liberty that are negotiable, areas that aren't, and so forth, is to stoop low. It is to lose before the argument has actually begun. It is to accept the faulty premise that privacy is about hiding something -- that it is an active attempt to conceal information from the world. No, privacy isn't the action being taken. Invasion of privacy is the action. Privacy is simply a state of being, and one to which we have an inalienable right.
Privacy isn't something we opt into; it is something we don't even really consider until we are made, or compelled, or asked to opt out. "Nothing to hide" begs the question. It assumes, as a foregone premise, that privacy is an opt-in decision that we consciously undertake in defense of something (and that something is implied to be onerous or illegal). This is just fallacious logic, plain and simple.
It's unfortunate that a right to privacy wasn't inumerated directly in the constitution, but was instead defined indirectly. This is one of those areas where the founders really couldn't have known how far technology would go, and how important something like privacy -- which may have been taken for granted back then -- would become 200+ years later.
"Because we're better than that"
[0] In a loose sense. Terrorists try to kill us, and the only way to stop them is with force. A lot of the same principles apply.
-- Noam Chomsky
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_S...
My point was just that the metric being used was irrelevant to the comparison being made.
If we'll kill thousands of Arabs to protect freedom, we shouldn't be so eager to walk away from it for the death of a few thousand Americans.
I would also suggest that abandoning principle for expediency can be hobbling in itself. Wars aren't entirely fought by robots just yet. "Power" isn't a column in an Excel spreadsheet.
First Amendment - freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. Ensuring that me and my buddies can get together and talk about overthrowing the government.
Second Amendment - right to bear arms. Ensuring I have the ability to inflict harm on/protect myself from government actors.
Third Amendment - right against quartering troops. Ensuring the government can't put soldiers in my house to listen to me or intimidate me.
Fourth Amendment - right against unreasonable search and seizure. The government can't come in and take my stuff unless and until I do something "wrong."
I could go on, but to my view, is all about revolution. There may be those who think we've moved to a place in society where governments like ours are benevolent and that the majority will is always right. I don't.
Maybe people think that hanging onto such rights is futile given F-16s and M1 Abrams. I think our difficulty in Afghanistan and Iraq is a pretty good refutation of that position.
Privacy is important because, without it, bad guys can make us slaves.
The second amendment is saying 'we're not going to restrict arms, because we need a body of men to call on who know how to use arms, in order to maintain our independence', not 'fear your government, be prepared to shoot its representitives'.
1. Notwithstanding that language, it's an individual right. See Heller.
2. Militias were, almost exclusively, the province Of the individual states. There was not until relatively recently a standing federal army. The point was to keep arms in the hands of individuals.
The Bill of Rights is a check on large centralized government. It's the whole point. Don't forget that these guys had just been through precisely such a revolution. There are some pretty striking quotes from Thomas Jefferson directly on point.
The terrorists have won if we give up our freedoms in fear of them. That is their whole tactic.
To point 2, I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. I'm somewhere near the nothing to hide camp, but it's just a matter of picking battles and honestly not expecting everything I do to be private. I do not benefit in any way from wiretapping.
I draw the line as anything some guy with a fake mustache following me around could observe is fair game. I expect my "letters" to be private, my goings about in public spaces are not.
The article does a good job of bringing up processing power and collation of info, which is a concern. Overall though, I'm more worried about actions taken based on intel than on intel gathering itself. You are always going to be broadcasting some "signal", so let's focus on the active use of such data, rather than the passive gathering.
Regardless of that, I was talking about monitoring, not broadcasting. If the police cameras record what happens on every street corner and the video is archived for potential review, I think that's quite different than live streaming to the internet. Almost all of these arguments hinge on the police watching something, and then doing something unpleasant. Maybe the doing is inevitable, but I don't think that's a foregone conclusion, so therefore I also don't think such what if scenarios are slam dunk indictments of monitoring itself.
Then comes the problem of how this information is being used against you. Since you're now more of an open book, and the government is opaque-as-usual, you can't know how they're using your information in many cases, or even how it's affecting your life. Sure, you can send FOIA requests, but then you need to know WHAT to ask for, and even that kind of information is a jealously kept secret, and such requests can be vetoed on "security" grounds. You simply cannot know EVERYTHING that they're doing, but they sure as hell want to know everything that YOU'RE doing.
It's like poker, except you have to show all your cards and you're not allowed to see theirs.
And while people in the US like to take for granted that democracy inevitably marches towards freedom, that simply isn't always so.
There's no guarantee that what was once illegal or suitable grounds for harassment by the community and authorities won't become so again.
"Harmless" records of yourself enjoying alcohol, common recreational drugs, listening to certain brands of music, interacting with currently-legitimate political parties or activist groups -- all could one day be held against you and be found as grounds to have authorities and/or the wider community harass, arrest or otherwise sanction you.
A coup is never off the table.
Actually those points come up in pretty much every book about privacy. Your first point is heavily discussed in Jeffrey Rosen's book The Unwanted Gaze, and your second point is sort of the point of Bruce Schneier's book Beyond Fear. See also any of Daniel Solove's books.
With but a few extreme outliers, everyone in a civilized society has something to hide.
As a practical matter, getting to court and fighting a case is often so expensive that the viewer's determination may be effectively final. However, your comment assumes the worst and then works backward in search of a logical antecedent.
2. Privacy also reduces the chance I will be discriminated against. If you've lived in a country where the law decides whether you are allowed to purchase land based on your religious beliefs, then you'd appreciate that the less people know about you, the less they can prejudge you.
3. Private conversations allow ideas to be discussed and discarded if they turn out to be wrong or worse still turn out to have ethical issues attached. If every thought are treated as a matter of public discourse that can be held against you in the future, then people will be keeping their mouth shut.
4. One only have to look at how "suspected symphatizers" were killed when South Vietnam fell, to understand that privacy allows people to keep their heads low, and should the environment turn nasty, to stay out of trouble.
This is the most fundamental reason I have seen yet, reflected (often unconsciously) in our daily lives: We have curtains, we talk in private, we have secrets we only tell to those we trust, have company confidentials, discretion, spokesmen, and don't negotiate our salaries in public.
Why? Because we instinctively try to minimize those who might take advantage over us.
Knowledge can be exploited in so many ways that it is very hard to tell if a certain piece of information is harmless or not. If you're at the mercy of someone else, depending on him not to exploit his knowledge over you, you lose freedom.
Most people at least feel this and therefore - in their social interactions - act accordingly. Interestingly, as soon at no human face is involved, my observation is that these instincts break down. I believe that's the core issue today, where most information isn't collected by some creepy stalker, but by web services, governments and card readers. They seem so detached from a real (potentially threatening) person, that our deeply engrained secrecy patterns fail us.
Private information is valuable social currency which we use to measure and define the distance between ourselves and others. There are things that are only told to the significant other for instance. By knowing them she/he not only has more power on me but also rightly feels closer to me than anyone else.
When someone finds out such information about me - harmless or not - without my consent he/she positions him/herself too close to me and I feel justly violated. The same way someone may try to diminsh the distance by disclosing facts that are not told to a stranger, expecting me to reciprocate. But at least then I have the option to decline.
I think this is the core issue: wanting privacy is basically wanting to retain control of how close I let other people come, and controlling the amount of facts they know about me is the tool to define that distance. Stealing this valuable social currency does not differ that much from stealing any other type of currency.
I couldn't agree more. When I graduated from high school, coming from a small town, I wanted to get a college degree. Unfortunately, I had a low self-esteem and many friends and relatives that would belittle me or my goal. I don't know if they were jealous or I was such an underachiever in high school that it was hard for them to believe I could reach my goal. This really undermined my confidence and my ability to study, leading me to drop out more than once. Finally, I stopped hanging around that town, did not tell anyone about my plans except a few people, and cut off the relationships that put me down the most. Then I went back to college and it was a breeze. I'm not totally cynical, but I believe there are a lot of people out there that will use personal information to hurt you, and it's best to minimize what you tell others until you know who you can trust.
That's the only example I need to convince me that the government does not need to know everything about who am I and what I do and what I think.
When I use this example to illustrate how an information that was once "clean" can become "dirty", they don't seem to understand. They act like that "incident" is soo far away, some sort of horror story(!) that has nothing to do with today. Everything will stay like it is now.
I guess the idea of something like 1933 happening again is so frightening or detached that they just dismiss it.
EDIT: I should add that people who actually lived in the time of Nazi-Germany might have a very different reaction to jgrahamc's argument. I made my observation above mainly with young people.
Having nothing to hide now doesn't mean you'll never have something to hide in retrospect.
The more information the government has, the more it enables future oppressive action.
Registering a person's lawful property or activities (whatever they may be) is a great way to target them in the future. If the government decided to outlaw, say, baking soda, it would be prohibitively difficult to enforce because there is no existing mechanism for tracking the sale, ownership and transfer of baking soda. Persons owning baking soda could easily bury it in their backyard and claim they never had it. Not so if the gov't has an inventory of all of your property (or access to your credit card statements, for example).
So my point is in line with the OP: simply because an activity is lawful doesn't me we should accept unlimited government surveillance of it.
So turning over everything to this large group, with all its power is... risky to say the least.
I would also extend my distrust to corporations. While I don't have a ready-to-mind example, I am sure that, humans being human, gross abuses of power by corporations based on certain datapoints being available exist. I am pretty sure the LGBT community has a slew of great examples there, as well as other outsider communities.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_Republic_of...
* In the 1930s being Japanese in the USA was perfectly legal. After 1942 it was not.
* Prior to 1947, Americans had freedom of association. Starting in 1947, numerous people were denied employment, and some were jailed ("Hollywood Ten") because of their association. This was a campaign of both government and corporate intimidation.
* Over the past decade or so, numerous people have been denied a certain amount of freedom of movement without any sort of due process because their names generated a match on the TSC's No Fly List.
Those are three very easy examples taken just from the USA. You could generate a much longer list with a bit more effort and expanding to other countries.
Giving one organization too much power in a society is bad for long term health of that society. If you want your children to grow up in a healthy society it's on your shoulders to fight laws that give organizations too much power.
By giving the government unlimited access to our privacy it gives the government great amounts of power.
Historically when an organization (such as a governments, FBI (J. Edgar Hoover), Churches, etc) have been given large amounts of power it has quickly lead to a spiral of corruption and destruction of morality and societal values.
If some one tells you:
"If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear."
"I want you to sign over all of your assets to
a government official of my choice. If you
trust the government, you've got nothing to fear."
I used to work in the education sector, and we had access to "anonymised" data. I was able to determine my own National Insurance number using only my address as I'd done an HND a few years before. Basically, anonymising meant removing the first and last name fields only! This was working for a private sector firm that was given the data by the government. I was also on only £10k/year and so presumably a vulnerable target for corruption. And this wasn't even one of the more "secure" datasets we had access to.
How many others are there like me out there with access to your data?
>In Britain, for example, the government has installed millions of public-surveillance cameras in cities and towns, which are watched by officials via closed-circuit television.
"The government"? Very tricksy linguistic sleight of hand makes us sound like an police-state-controlled surveillance society with no privacy and a tyrannical government.
What rot. By far the vast majority of CCTV in the country is owned and operated by private companies on their own private property. This is a huge difference.
>In a campaign slogan for the program, the government declares: "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear."
Come on now. That's almost cartoonish levels of sloppy writing. No such slogan has ever been used by either our government, or, as far as I know, any organisation concerned with security.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1362493/One-CCTV-cam...
The research involved police community support officers
counting every camera in Cheshire and extrapolating the
results nationwide to provide a reliable estimate of the
level of CCTV surveillance in the UK.
Officers counted 12,333 cameras in the area, according to
a study published in CCTV Image magazine, the majority of
which were inside premises, rather than facing public
street.
The research also found that most CCTV cameras in the UK
are likely to be privately owned, with only 504 of
Cheshire’s cameras run by public bodies.
Of course, one would think that it wouldn't be very difficult for the authorities to obtain footage from privately-owned cameras.
edit: changed "you cite" to "cited", The response is not to the OP.
Regarding the "processing" argument in the original article. It seems to me that government owned cameras are a bigger concern, if we assume that they can provide a general combined view (while privately owned cameras provide a lot of isolated views).
EDIT: spelling
As an individual I've easily been able to obtain stills from privately operated security cameras, once when I left something in a taxi, and needed to track down the operator (got that within minutes), and another in relation to a no-fault car accident (feckin' motor-cycle courier!), in both cases just by tracking down the owner of a public facing camera and asking nicely. On that basis, I doubt the police would have any more difficulty doing the same, but there is still a significant difference between this and the "police state" image this article portrays.
A number plate recognition camera logging everyone entering London is owned and operated by the contractor providing the billing for the congestion charge - so it's not a government camera. But you don't think the government could have access to the data?
It's like saying there is no government cell phone monitoring - the monitoring is all done by commercial cell phone companies.
The UK just passed a law appointing a Surveillance Camera Commissioner to oversee all the uses of such cameras nationwide. I am not aware that any other countries have found such an appointment necessary.
Link to a picture: http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2469622
You name it, we have a CCTV for it!
The latter seem to be referencing a tabloid scare from two or three years ago about supervised housing for families of repeat offenders (which wouldn't necessarily have involved cameras, according to the top result). There are also some results about the legality of installing cameras in private homes in the UK, which makes sense as a search.
Anyway, you would never really talk about "installing" roads, daycares, or homeless shelters. Traffic lights and dictators, maybe, but Google's auto-suggest is not an objective measure of anything.
The important this is that people be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects", not whether the police can see you walking down the road.
Similarly, if someone is speaking out loud in public, you can listen, but wiretapping is still wrong.
And just because someone can view your actions in public doesn't make it okay to monitor and log every person on every square foot of public space continuously.
The difference is that the real person costs a lot which mean its guaranteed to be small-scale and overseen and they couldn't keep it up indefinitely nor go back over their old recordings.
A cctv camera represents a completely different threat and has long-term implications compared to a plain clothes policeman.
Also, if people have nothing to hide, let me access their computers for an evening, and also let me send any "proof" of breaking "stupid laws", like watching a dvd on their computer, or accessing a file with unwarranted DMCA takedown notice out for it. There's a lot of potential for innocent people going to jail in a video taped society.
If crimes as minor as decrypting a DVD were actually prosecuted then it wouldn't be a lot of people going to jail. It would be everybody. Including all the cops and judges. Which is never going to happen.
The real danger here is selective enforcement of laws, and the selective enforcement of laws. Well, we have the later already (see "Professional Courtesy") but the former gets much more dangerous to the extent that police officers can control which videos do or do not end up at a courtroom. If a lawyer can show that the police are regularly ignoring an offense in other contexts that can be a defense in the US, but in practice the US justice system does a very bad job of getting exculpatory police collected video evidence into the hands of defense lawyers.
So you're the only person who knows all 3000-10000 (depending on the source) federal crimes out there (assuming you're in the USA).
Recently I've come across an argument that I think helps reveal the problems to those who are not prone to see them: if you have nothing to hide, would you give a copy of your house key to the police to check on your house whenever they want?
Suddenly everything becomes obvious: the cost of inconvenience (what if I'm asleep?), the cost of potential corruption or incompetence (what if they lose the key?), the cost of potential misinterpretation, etc...
Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies -- whoever they happen to be at the time.
Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.
Just imagine if i was researching something slightly more taboo. Someone could easily jump to the wrong conclusions.
I might have nothing to hide, but it certainly isn't right that my information is being used to generate a potentially scandalous false picture of what i might be looking for.
"If your private thoughts were broadcast on a television screen above your head for everyone to see, its fair to say we'd all be more careful what we thought about. We would be forced to practice thought control to give others a good impression. Mental self-discipline is great, but this imaginary scenario illustrates a critical point: the absence of privacy has the ability to influence.
Moreover, the one who usurps privacy is the one who wields that influence. And such control at the cost of privacy is the opposite of freedom. Democracy and freedom are upheld by the individual's right to form thought and opinion and to communicate within the haven of privacy."
Ukrainian peasants were deported and killed for having more property that their neighbor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization 14.5 million dead
Central and Eastern European Jews first had their privacy violated before their jobs taken, moved to ghettos then to concentration camps. Imagine having a German last name but a Jewish grandmother, privacy matters. Or imagine if Germany did not have a handgun registry-- then its harder to confiscate guns from Jews, which makes its much more dangerous to herd them into camps.
Privacy loss ends in dead bodies-- but only after its too late to regain.
There is one thing that convinces me, though. I see lots of companies with data just completely misinterpreting it and screwing people over all the time. For instance, I can open a bunch of tabs in Google Groups from Google Reader with the intent to read them later, and get banned by Google Groups because Google decided in their all knowing wisdom that anyone opening tabs that quick must by a bot who has to be banned. Similarly you see AdSense and PayPal accounts banned all the time when the person is actually innocent.
These draconian policies may be good for the company (since it makes sure the actual fraudsters are banned too) and bad for the innocents caught in the way, but as an innocent who can be caught in the way, it makes sense to give them as little data to make up imagined offenses with as possible. Having Google ban innocents all the time is one thing, but we can't really let the government get away with that. That's what the whole innocent until proven guilty business is about and the show me the corpse/evidence and trial by jury things came about because of.
I have long looked for a more crystal clear way of formulating the importance of privacy and why it's different from having something to hide.
http://docs.law.gwu.edu/facweb/dsolove/Nothing-to-Hide/index...
The focus of the article and most of the comments here suggests it's government power. There's hardly a peep about the fact that credit card companies have giant databases filled with information about everything you've ever purchased, which they gladly sell to anyone, that retailers like Target know your daughter is pregnant before you do, or that Google knows so much about your personal emails that you get ads from 1-800-flowers while reading an email about a friend passing away.
Many of the comments here seem to treat privacy as some pure moral good, some innate human right. If that's the case, shouldn't government officials have complete privacy, after all, they're human aren't they? Shouldn't they be allowed to take unlimited amounts of money from unknown people without anyone knowing? Shouldn't they be allowed to make secret laws that are kept private? What about your employees and your co-workers? Shouldn't everything they do at work be completely private?
The obvious answer is no, there are clearly situations where some limitation of privacy is warranted. Society does not function with complete anonymity and it never has. There are reasonable arguments about where that dividing line should be drawn, but surely we can agree that privacy has both and bad, right?
I think such naturalistic arguments don't hold up. Children have no sense of many things - they don't see dangers in stepping onto a street without looking, and they don't see dangers in giving up their privacy. If they don't value it, should we not protect their privacy?
Children and some small societies often don't have a strong sense of property rights either - yet would you argue from that that a more complex society still doesn't require property rights?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
It includes some stories that illustrate why information about you, even when you have done nothing wrong, can be used against you by authorities, even purely by mistake not accounting to any corruption/bias/pressure-to-catch/punish-somebody, etc.
If the US government or some MegaCorp wants to dump all of their correspondence and data, decrypted, onto the internet for my perusal, and unlock all the doors, safes, fences and windows on their buildings, then I might consider opening up my personal life to them as well.
Privacy isn't just about freedom from unwanted attention. It's about your right to remain free of unwanted intrusions in your life. Privacy law protects a woman's choice to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, a homosexual male's choice to privately engage in sodomy with the consent of another, and a heterosexual couple's choice concerning the use of contraception for non-procreative sex. Privacy also protects your right to refuse medical attention for yourself and, in some jurisdictions, on behalf of your minor children. It additionally applies to a family's choices in rearing their children: the right to privacy protects a family's choice of religion, meals to eat, whether to participate in religion, etc.
When people claim that they don't mind putatively invidious legislation because they have "nothing to hide," they are doing an enormous disservice to privacy law. They might as well say: "We don't mind the government acting as our (family's) autopilot."
1. You're computer might be in use for spam or hacking banks and governments sites. 2. Data leak - credit cards, accounts, and main - personal information. 3. In Ukraine we have joke - Facebook.com - let your wife meet your lovers. 4. From your info it is possible to find info on your friends.
And this is for people who have nothing to hide.
Questions of privacy in Internet is a big problem. But privacy should be privacy, not anonymity.
As for cameras on streets... In future we will have no chance to hide. Nothing.
Because you have to earn intimacy.
Because my sharing is not reciprocated.
Because I don't trust you.
If someone were to walk in on me having sex, I might be a bit embarrassed, but not unduly bothered. If a voyeur were to surreptitiously watch me, that’d be a breach of privacy. It’s about who’s consuming the information, not who’s producing it.
My response is something like "so you'd be fine with a random mandatory search of your house twice a year, that takes 12 hours, during which all your electronic devices will be confiscated for two weeks of processing?" They'll say "no, that doesn't happen." But it will with their attitude.
I'd be thrilled to have access to a complete real time data of every financial transaction.
Imagine looking at any object around you, and being able to tell how much each component cost, the source of the component, and the company info that transformed the parts into an object, recursively all the way down to dust.
That would be amazing. Even more, that would be enough for me want to make my financial info public to the world, rather than just credit card companies, and everyone that buys that data from them.
The nothing to hide argument doesn't stand unless every person in the country is constantly surveilled and all information collected is fully accessible to everyone.
Can someone give me an argument against "nothing to hide" that doesn't boil down to "yes, you do!"? Honestly, I live somewhere squarely in the middle of the "nothing to hide" camp, and would really like to not be, if at all possible. I just can't justify changing my position on this if I don't know of a valid argument, however.
The reality is, try as we might, there is no way to regain full privacy. Ever.
One of Bartow's responses: http://madisonian.net/2011/05/26/of-debunking-and-willful-di...
She seems to be more annoyed with the idea that Solove's writings read like a High School sophomore's rather than the validity of his arguments.
"THE RIGHT TO PRIVACY." by Warren and Brandeis -- originally published in 1891(!):
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/37368/37368-h/37368-h.htm
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Seriously, out of all of the human emotions, why do we constantly feel the need to justify the desire for privacy?
Has a download link in it to the 28-page essay. Compared to this really turgid article by the same author, the essay is really engrossing. Incidentally, I just finished reading it a few days ago on a privacy paper binge, and I also recommend
Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006
which is an even better paper, although it clocks in at 77 pages. Also free.
Some fun findings:
1. The combination of ZIP code, birth date (including year), and sex is unique to 87 per cent of Americans. Cross-reference this with voter data, and you're busted.
2. The information of how and when you rated any three movies on Netflix can identify more than 80 per cent of its users (68% for two movies). Cross-reference this with IMDb database, and you're busted.
It's scary as hell to learn that privacy is an even harder problem to solve, as someone who cares deeply about it. The key take-away from the latter paper is that privacy and utility are mutually exclusive - you can't "anonymize" data. The second is that we have to rethink our concept of personal identifiable information, because everything can be used to whittle down the candidates to a unique person with the right information.
We are so far from implementing useful privacy measures legally and practically that it's ridiculous. We are being embarrassingly myopic by only turning our attention to social networks, when there are privacy vulnerabilities everywhere.
Unless it's biometric data that we can relate to our own body - retina, fingerprint, facial features, DNA, etc. - , there is some psychological mechanism that makes us less averse and sensitive to the collection of data about us. Compare how you feel about the police storing DNA and fingerprints of acquitted suspects to how the NSA is trying to basically data-mine the entire communication infrastructure. That is, when careless companies or witless users don't just hand the information to them directly.
For people who care as much as privacy, as people in technology circles do, we have a really bad habit of focusing our attention narrowly at mainly what Silicon Valley does. But consider the value of something as simple as your zip code, birth date, and sex, and how many sites you might hand out that information to - the last information of which can usually be inferred by the service or commodity you buy, or your name.