However, when information about a person is gathered in a passive way using new technologies - such as through locations sensors, cell phone locators, videotape monitoring systems, or mining of disparate electronic records in a coordinated way; or when the use of the information is not clearly revealed - such as how cookies track behavior in the Internet environment - it is questionable whether a person does, indeed, have control over information about him or her self.
The questions of balance here are not easy ones to answer. On the one hand, there is a long-held presumption of privacy in the U.S., the right, as Justice Brandeis put it, “to be left alone.” There is also the assertion that personal information is intellectual property, and that therefore it should be as protected to at least the same extent as a novel or scholarly article.
On the other hand, there is traditionally no legal expectation of privacy if one is on a public street, for example, so information about where a person is at a particular time belongs to anyone who “sees” that person there. Does the fact that it is not a person that “sees” but a sensor device or a satellite or a video camera change that situation? Does the fact that the “seeing” of that person is not subject the limitations of human memory but becomes an electronic memory that can last for decades or centuries change the situation? And if a person chooses to sell information about him or her self for one purpose, for example by filling out an application for a buyer’s loyalty card that provides discounts at the supermarket, should that information then belong to the purchaser (the supermarket) to do with as it pleases in the same way that an individual can do what he or she pleases with a purchased coat or chair?
As passive data gathering technology increasingly impinges on every sphere of our lives, these are important and urgent questions to wrestle with as a society, and to come to informed, scientifically sound conclusions about.
Back to Professional Interests
