Privacy's Trust Gap: A Review
Citation: Neil Richards, Woodrow Hartzog (2017) Privacy's Trust Gap: A Review. Yale Law Journal (RSS)
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Privacy's Trust Gap: A Review
Download: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/review/privacys-trust-gap-a-review
Tagged:
Summary
Review of Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest by Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum as a vehicle to make authors' case for importance of information relationships (compare confidentiality to privacy) and the role of trust through law and institutions (compare to "guerilla warfare" of obfuscation).
"Missing from the individual view of privacy and security law is the more nuanced understanding that in a connected society, privacy is not just an individual concern, but a major building block for society as a whole. This is privacy’s trust gap."
"we believe that the first-best solution to problems of social power that Obfuscation catalogs is not revolution, but regulation // The sustainable path to fixing a broken world is through social movements, participation in the democratic political process, and the rule of law."
Four foundations of trust/characteristics of trustworthy data stewards:
- commitment to be honest about data practices
- discreet use of data
- protective of personal data against outsiders
- loyalty to the people whose data is being used, so that it is data and not humans that become exploited
Trust allows other problems to not be zero-sum, eg individual's privacy gain as company's or government's loss.
Practical steps:
- encourage the further development of existing trust norms as a business practice in the technology industry
- develop legal rules to provide additional incentives for trustworthiness and to punish companies that act in ways that are trust-corrosive or disloyal
- place meaningful checks on government surveillance and government access to information held by companies on behalf of their customers
