Law in the Internet Society

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SteveMesserSecondPaper 3 - 23 Aug 2014 - Main.EbenMoglen
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 Alexandra Alter’s article in the Wall Street Journal, “Your E-book is Reading You,” was one of the more illuminating, and (in a sense) encouraging articles I came across throughout our course. The article highlighted one of the common themes of our course: the extent to which your online behavior (especially the behavior you did not deliberately publicize and may have assumed was ‘private’) can be accessed by agencies attempting to persecute or to profit from you. The concept of collecting data about digital reading behavior is, I suppose, a very logical extension of many of the data mining practices we have encountered in this course. Nonetheless, while this practice may not, in principle, be any more a violation of privacy than the collection (and distribution and subsequent use) of online behavior data in other contexts (such as shopping or Facebook), some aspect of the nature of reading lead me (and evidently some privacy advocates) to find this practice particularly intrusive.

One privacy advocate (Cindy Cohn, Legal Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation) is quoted as saying “There's a societal ideal that what you read is nobody else's business.” Perhaps this notion resonates with and is shared by a greater percentage of the public than are concerns about electronic privacy in other contexts. Perhaps the fact that everyone in this country has grown up with reading but a minority of it has grown up with Facebook is driving the heightened and enthusiastic resistance in this area. It may be that consumers have long viewed reading (and underlining, and rereading, and note-taking in margins) as a uniquely and intensely personal activity in which they could escape and reflect without fear of anyone else peering in. For one reason or another, the practice of passively collecting data about consumers’ digital reading behavior has produced a relatively swift (and somewhat successful) response from what the article refers to as the “privacy watchdog” community.


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