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"The fact that private industry does most of the surreptitious gathering, processing, sale, and then use of data may be at least as threatening to a viable democratic society's personal liberty and core values as the traditional fears of a state panopticon." So say Dan Brenznitz, Seymour Goodman, and Michael Murphree - respectively an associate professor, professor, and PhD student in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs - in their jointly-authored essay "Ubiquitous Data Collection: Rethinking Privacy Debates."
The article discusses the ubiquitous collection, dissemination, and processing of data as well as the nature of the risks involved. An excerpt follows:
The Current Debate
Current debates over online privacy and the right to the security and inviolability of individual data appear to be informed by such visions. Proposed legislation and policy actions from congressional representatives Jackie Speier of California and Joe Barton of Texas emphasize the problems arising from the apparent loss of privacy. Meanwhile, lobbying activity by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and similar groups on behalf of data harvesters attempts to assuage fears of privacy violations.
These debates aren't uniquely American. The European Union has enacted a series of laws designed to preempt certain categories of privacy invasion such as forbidding the storage, transmission, or processing of certain types of data outside sovereign country borders. Cultural traditions in Japan and elsewhere create different types of online privacy and commercial dynamics, which in turn shape the way privacy is interpreted and addressed.
Unlike dystopian predictions of an authoritarian government-created surveillance society, the most active protagonist today is private industry. The fact that private industry does most of the surreptitious gathering, processing, sale, and then use of data may be at least as threatening to a viable democratic society's personal liberty and core values as the traditional fears of a state panopticon.
Redefining the Problem
Regardless of the actor, however, the emphasis in debates about the merits or threats from ubiquitous data collection falls on an individual’s right to privacy.
But there’s a glaring oversight in arguments that place so much emphasis on a narrow definition of privacy. To illustrate, in the past, an employee who had a dispute with an employer would write a letter to management or the human resources department. The issue would remain between employer and employee and could be settled as such. If a record was kept, it would remain with the employer.
Today, electronic communication and data storage mean that there’s not only a permanent record, but one that’s relatively open to those technology-savvy enough to access these resources. In the modern world, the record of an employment dispute can result in permanent blacklisting, making it difficult for a job seeker to find work. This is a much greater problem than just the violation of the individual’s privacy.
The searchability of amounts of data creates another great problem. As so much data is available on the Internet, those interested can use sophisticated ICT tools to coax out relationships in the data. Using the results of these unmonitored and largely unproven analytics, companies—most notably insurers and banks—are beginning to rate potential clients without actually making contact with them. These ratings, based on data that may or may not dactually predict what it’s supposed to, might sharply limit options available to people whose lives are analyzed. Life insurers have begun using social network analysis—such as Facebook friends—to determine a person’s likely life expectancy, whether or not these online personalities have any bearing on actual behavior or risk. Thus, the real risk is not the loss of privacy per se, but the ubiquity of data collection, both passive and active, online and offline, combined with powerful ICT tools that allow its manipulation and usage for supposedly predictive purposes. This activity is already occurring, largely without public debate on its merit and influence.
Read the full article as published in Computer Magazine, June 2011.
