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FairInformationCode 3 - 16 Feb 2009 - Main.JustinColannino
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| META TOPICPARENT | name="PartFour" |
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Background
In the last class on PartFour I proposed the idea of regulating forgetting, forcing data keepers to sunset data. Eben raised First Amendment issues with that proposal, which I think are compelling. However, there may be other sorts of information practices which could be mandated through regulation on government and third parties that may not raise such concerns and that would be useful for providing some protection against losing our identity to those who aggregate information about our lives. Perhaps we can use this space to think of a set of information practices that we would like to see codified, and discuss whether this is a worthwhile exercise at all. | | | (1) There should be no secret databanks and (2) There must be a procedure for a person to access their record -- we're not normally in the business of forcing people to reveal everything they may or may not know about other people. Isn't this a massive privacy invasion in itself? | |
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< | (2) The data should not be disseminated without the person's consent -- this is a clear limitation on the content of a private party's speech | >
> | (3) The data should not be disseminated without the person's consent -- this is a clear limitation on the content of a private party's speech | | | (4) There must be a procedur for a person to correct misinformation -- lots of case law about the unconstitutionality of analogous proposals for rights of reply to newspaper editorials, etc. Traditional 1st Amendment theory is that misleading speech should be countered by correcting speech, but noone is required to provide you with a forum (at their expense). | | | I recognize there are issues with the enforcement of such a limitation--if the data is valuable, people will find ways to get at it--, but I don't see how it is any harder to enforce then a sunset clause on data held by private parties.
-- AndreiVoinigescu - 16 Feb 2009 | |
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While I agree with Andrei's well reasoned points against the 1973 proposal to private parties in general, I think that it is overly simplistic to group all private information gathering and retention practices together, and then to condemn regulation on them all. For example, as noted previously, the Fair Credit Reporting Act was enacted to provide transparency in the methods of determining a persons creditworthiness. See, Fair Credit Reporting Act § 602. Also, regulations for fair information practices in certain industries could conform with and even enhance first amendment principals. For example, the American Library Association (ALA) has been fighting certain provisions in the Patriot Act that force libraries to hand over patron records to the FBI upon request. The ALA believes that the law has a severe chilling effect on free speech. Though their efforts to repeal the legislation has failed, the ALA's current solution is to severely limit record retention.
These are just two examples. I think we all agree that some fair information practices should be imposed on the government, but perhaps not always on private parties. Maybe the way forward, if this discussion has any value, is to think about when/whether information practices of private entities should be regulated. Does the Fair Credit Reporting Act go too far? Should something similar to the ALA's resolution apply to ISP's? To Google?
-- JustinColannino - 16 Feb 2009 | | | |
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