Respecting Privacy, Reaping the Benefits
In the second panel of the conference—“Respecting Privacy, Reaping the Benefits”—speakers discussed various ways in which developing geo-location technologies and business models can be designed to ensure sufficient respect for privacy. The panel also reflected on what might or might not count as “sufficient respect for privacy.”
Professor Richard Warner gave a presentation titled “Location, Privacy, and Norms—How I Learned to Love Surveillance.” The presentation focused on the trade-offs found in technology-privacy issues—for instance, Internet users want more control over their personal information than they currently have. Private businesses, the government, and other aggregators that collect private data receive more power and control the more they collect, taking control away from the user. This is especially true in the case of personal location data. Despite its negative effects, however, the collection of personal information by such powerful entities is what creates the many benefits users enjoy, including an Internet infrastructure that offers relevance, efficiency, personalization, and free sites.
Warner outlined our current plight as a vicious cycle of submitting our privacy to large corporations in order to obtain the benefits of data collection. Is there a way out that offers more control and better trade-offs? Warner’s solution was that “informational norms,” not the law or market forces, provide the best chance at retaining an acceptable level of both privacy and technological benefits.
Informational norms are socially-coordinated standards that work to constrain the collection, use, and distribution of personal information. Just as informational norms direct our pharmacists to be concerned only with relevant drug information and not with our irrelevant personal information, so similar norms should limit online entities’ access to our private data. Warner emphasized the need to create new norms to which businesses conform, despite the problematic speed of technological advancement which renders such creation difficult.
Professor Warner’s forthcoming book, Unauthorized Access: The Crisis in Online Privacy and Information Security (Chapman and Hall/CRC, with Robert Sloan), addresses many of the issues outlined in his conference presentation.
Visit Professor Warner’s Bepress and SSRN pages to read additional articles and chapters on privacy and technology, including the following:
– Behavioral Advertising: From One-Sided Chicken to Informational Norms
– Undermined Norms: The Corrosive Effect of Information Processing Technology on Informational Policy
– Turned on its Head?: Norms, Freedom, and Acceptable Terms in Internet Contracting
Leave a Reply