Computers, Privacy & the Constitution

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The Tragedy of the Communicative Commons: Privacy, Consumerism, and Metaphor Inc.

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 -- By JonPenney - 08 Mar 2009

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 Privacy is not doing so well these days. Today, the greatest threats do not concern places like the home— the spheres of intimacy the Founders care so much about — but consumer information compiled about and from citizens by private commercial entities and stored in databases easily accessible to the state or corporate interests by contract or subpoena. Acknowledging that the Constitution’s privacy protections are outmoded is just one step. Central to the problem is citizens’ indifference to their own privacy trade-offs in our culture of consumerism and convenience. Polls show people do care about privacy loss, they just do very little about it, or do not understand how trading away informational privacy to save a few measly bucks might be a bad idea.
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Directions Forward

But is tragedy inevitable? Not necessarily. First, privacy theorists need to stop relying so heavily on metaphor. A clever slogan may be helpful, but there may be better as yet tested strategies to promote privacy among the public. One possibility is to follow Daniel Solove’s lead, who has recently focused on formulating taxonomies of privacy threats; that is, a clear, and easily communicated charting of all types of privacy threats for consumers or citizens in a given sector. Such an approach certainly offers a great wealth of information for public awareness and also, to be blunt, treats people less childishly. Dumbing-down the complexities of privacy in a word or slogan is absurd. Second, if privacy metaphors must remain then advocates need to out-think the potentates of consumerism; appropriation of metaphor is not inevitable if the metaphor itself cannot credibly used for commercial purpose. This requires innovative and artful thought; but, for example, surely it would be difficult to appropriate the cockroach-like and privacy starved Gregor Samsa, of Kafka’s anti-consumerist classic Metamorphosis, to promote consumer goods?
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Revision 16r16 - 14 May 2009 - 07:16:08 - JonPenney
Revision 15r15 - 01 May 2009 - 05:20:12 - JonPenney
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