Privacy law Essay Example

age Of ubiquitous networking.

KEY CONCEPTS Generation Google The number of young people using social-networking Web sites such as Faceable and My Space is staggering. At most college campuses, more than 90 percent of students maintain their own sites. I call the people growing up today 0 20 08 SCIENTIFIC AMERICA AN, INC. S social-networking sites allow seemingly trivial gossip to be distributed to a worldwide audience, moieties making people the butt of rumors shared by millions of users across the Internet. P public sharing of private lives has led to a rethinking of our current conceptions of privacy.

E existing law should be extended to allow some privacy protection for things that people say and do in what would have previously been considered the public domain. -?The Editors GENTRIFICATION'S 101 fast facts Every day people post more than 65,000 videos on Youth. In 2006 Namespace surpassed 100 million profiles. Since 1999 the number of blobs has grown from 50 to 50 million. More than 50 percent of blobs are written by children monger than 19.

"Generation Google. " For them, many fragments of personal information will reside on the Internet forever, accessible to this and future generations through a simple Google search.

That openness is both good and bad. People can now spread their ideas everywhere without reliance on publishers, broadcasters or other traditional gatekeepers. But that transformation also creates profound threats to privacy and reputations. The New York Times is not likely to care about the latest gossip at Dubuque Senior High School or Oregon State University.

Floggers and others communicating online may care a great deal. For them, stories and rumors about

friends, enemies, family members, bosses, co-workers and others are all prime fodder for Internet postings.

Before the Internet, gossip would spread by word of mouth and remain within the boundaries of that social circle. Private details would be confined to diaries and kept locked in a desk drawer.

Social networking spawned by the Internet allows communities worldwide to revert to the close-knit culture of presidential society, in which nearly every member of a tribe or a farming hamlet knew everything about the neighbors. Except that now the ';lagers" span the globe. College students have begun to share salacious details about their schoolmates.

A Web site called Campuses serves as an electronic bulletin board that allows students nationwide to post anonymously and without verification a sordid array Of tidbits about sex, [campus gossip sites] Blabbing to the World No detail is too intimate for Web sites that reveal misdeeds, lascivious exploits and other assorted gossip about college life. Is a popular electronic bulletin board where students can anonymously post gossip and rumors about other students.

The site declares that it was created with the "simple mission of enabling online anonymous free speech on college campuses. The gossip on Campuses is a mix Of sex, drugs, drunkenness, disease and other topics involving the dirty underbelly of college life. Don 't date him girl is a site that lets women post concerns about men they have dated. Their narratives about these wayward men often include men's real names and pictures. Unverified complaints sometimes claim that the men have sexually transmitted diseases or that they are abusive. 102 GENTRIFICATION'S @ 20 08 SCIENTIFIC AMERICA AN, INC.

Tommy Norman; sources:

campuses and don't date him girl (screen shots) Campuses drugs and drunkenness.

Another site, Don't Date Him Girl, invites women to post complaints about the men they have dated, along with real names and actual photographs. Social-networking sites and blobs are not the only threat to privacy. As several articles in this issue of Scientific American have already made clear, companies collect and use our personal information at every turn.

Your credit-card company has a record of your purchases. If you shop online, merchants keep tabs on every item you have bought. Your Internet service provider has information about how you surf the Internet. Your cable company has data about which television shows you watch.

The government also compromises privacy by assembling vast databases that can be searched for suspicious patterns of behavior.

The National Security Agency listens and examines the records of millions of telephone conversations. Other agencies analyze financial transactions. Thousands of government bodies at the federal and state level have records of personal information, chronicling births, marriages, employment, property ownership and more. The information is often stored in public records, making it readily accessible to anyone -? and the trend toward more accessible personal data continues to grow as more records become electronic. Recur: pooh (video clips); George Washington University Law School (Solve) The Future of Reputation Broad-based exposure of personal Information diminishes the ability to protect reputation by shaping the image that is presented to others.

Reputation plays an important role in society, and preserving private details of one's life is essential to it. We look to people's reputations to decide whether to make friends, go on a date, hire a

new employee or undertake a prospective business deal. Some would argue that the decline of privacy might allow people to be less inhibited and more honest.

But when everybody s transgressions re exposed, people may not judge one another less harshly. Having your personal information may fail to improve my judgment of you.

It may, in fact, increase the likelihood that will hastily condemn you. Moreover, the loss of privacy might inhibit freedom. Elevated visibility that comes with living in a transparent online world means you may never overcome past mistakes. People want to have the option of "starting over," of reinventing themselves throughout their lives. As American philosopher John Dew w w.

S c I Am . C 0 m [A public life] The Internet Never Forgets post on Youth can provoke global ridicule with the press of a return key. When a young man applied for a job at a U. S. Investment firm, he sent along a video with his rsum. Called Impossible Is Nothing, it showed the student engaging in a variety of physical feats, from bench-pressing 495 pounds to doing a ski jump to breaking bricks with a karate chop.

Throughout the clip, the student bragged about his athletic accomplishments and his overall success in life.

Needless to say, the video was not particularly appropriate for the job he was seeking, and his arrogance was so over the top that the video was quite funny. Apparently, someone at the investment firm leaked the died, and it was posted online. It became an instant hit and has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Throughout the Internet, the student has been

mocked and parodied.

His job prospects have diminished substantially. Although he certainly made a mistake and may have learned a lesson, his youthful bravado and misjudgment are now forever preserved in cyberspace. Y once said, a person is not "something complete, perfect, [or] finished," but is "something moving, changing, discrete, and above all initiating instead of final. " In the past, episodes of youthful experimentation and foolishness were eventually forgotten, giving us an opportunity to start anew, to change and to grow. But with so much information online, it is harder to make these moments forgettable. People must now live with the digital baggage of their pasts.

This openness means that the opportunities for members of Generation Google might be limited because of something they did years ago as wild teenagers.

Their intimate secrets may be revealed by other people they know. Or they might become the unwitting victim of a false rumor. Like it or not, many people are beginning to get used to having a lot more of their personal information online.

THE What Is to Be Done? Can we prevent a future in which so much inform nation about people's private lives circulates be yond their control? Some technologists and legal scholars flatly say no. Privacy, they maintain, is just not compatible with a world in which information flows so freely.

As Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems once famously declared: 'You already have zero privacy. Get over it. " Countless books and articles have heralded the "death" and "destruction" of privacy. Daniel J.

Solve is a professor Of law at the George Washington university Law School and author of The Future of

Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet (Yale University Press, 2007) and Understanding Privacy (Harvard university press, 2008). SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN 103 104 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Strategies to Protect privacy The U. S. Has less stringent privacy laws than do many other countries.

The desire to shield people's private lives on the Internet has prompted new thinking about how to balance openness with a need to restrict release of personal details. Appropriation Tort A name or likeness -? Angelina Jollies face, for example -? cannot be used for financial benefit in an advertisement without consent. To deal with inline abuses, this commonly tort could be expanded to protect against the posting of photographs online without consent. Breach of Confidentiality Tort Private information disclosed in privileged relationships -? to doctors, lawyers and clergy, among others protected.

This tort law could be strengthened to cover other relationships, such as spurned lovers, former friends or ex-spouses. Privacy in public under U. S. Law, a person does not retain any privacy rights when information becomes public. In Canada and many European countries, these disclosures do not imply the loss of all such rights. The U.

S. Should recognize that person does not sacrifice all privacy rights when appearing in public. -? D. J. S.

Ticket on Fandango or an item on another site, that information would pop up in that person's public profile.

Faceable rolled out these programs without adequately informing its users. People unwittingly found themselves shilling products on their friends' Web sites. And some people were shocked to see their private purchases on other Web sites suddenly displayed to the public as part of their profiles that appeared

on the Faceable site. The outcry and an ensuing online petition called for Faceable to reform its practices -? a comment that quickly attracted tens of thousands of signatures and that ultimately led to several changes.

As witnessed in these instances, privacy does not always involve sharing of secrets.

Faceable users did not want their identities used to endorse products with Social Ads. It is one thing to write about how much one enjoys a movie or CD; it is another to be used on a billboard to pitch products to others. Changing the Law Canada and most European countries have more stringent privacy statutes than the LLC. S. , which has resisted enacting all-encompassing legislation.

Privacy laws elsewhere recognize hat revealing information to others does not extinguish one's right to privacy.

Increasing accessibility of personal information, however, means that U. S. Law also should begin recognizing the need to safeguard a degree of privacy in the public realm. In some areas, U. S.

Law has a well-developed system of controlling information. Copyright recognizes strong rights for public information, protecting a wide range of works, from movies to software. Procuring copyright protection does not require locking a work of intellect behind closed doors. You can read a copyrighted magazine, make a duplicate for your own use ND lend it to others.

But you cannot do whatever you want: for instance, photocopying it from cover to cover or selling bootleg copies in the street. Copyright law tries to achieve a balance between freedom and control, even though it still must wrestle with the ongoing controversies in a digital age. The closest U. S.

Privacy law comes

to a legal doctrine akin to copyright is the appropriation tort, which prevents the use of someone else's name or likeness for financial benefit. Unfortunately, the law has developed in a way that is often ineffective against the type of privacy threats September 2008 Tommy Norman

Those proclamations are wrongheaded at best. It is still possible to protect privacy, but doing so requires that we rethink outdated understandings of the concept. One such view holds that privacy requires total secrecy: once information is revealed to others, it is no longer private.

This notion of privacy is unsuited to an online world. The generation of people growing up today understands privacy in a more nuanced way. They know that personal information is routinely shared with countless others, and they also know that they leave a trail of data wherever they go.