Computers, Privacy & the Constitution

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FairInformationCode 8 - 20 Feb 2009 - Main.MahaAtal
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META TOPICPARENT name="PartFour"

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.
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 Privacy is arguably different than environmental issues because both businesses and goverment stand to gain from knowing more about you. Their interests align. With enviromental issues, goverment is largely apathetic--open to influence from big oil/the coal industry, yes, but there's no arm of the goverment itself pushing for more fossil fuels to be burned.

-- AndreiVoinigescu - 19 Feb 2009

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All true, but it is precisely because government was more or less apathetic about the environment and therefore because business had been able to lobby them successfully that the public/NGOs pushed aggressively to force the kind of check/balance I'm describing. So no, these things don't develop organically and the role of civil society raising issue awareness is key, but I think the enviro case is an example of that.

One place on the privacy front where government and business don't align so neatly: government is by definition national, corporations aren't. Shouldn't it alarm the CIA that Google might also be working with governments the CIA is collecting intel ON? Might be one way for civil society to make the case to government?

-- MahaAtal - 20 Feb 2009

 
 
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Revision 7r7 - 19 Feb 2009 - 19:05:08 - AndreiVoinigescu
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