The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

Author:Jonathan Zittrain
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Technology

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Meeting the Risks of Generativity: Privacy 2.0

So far this book has explored generative successes and the problems they cause at the technical and content layers of the Internet. This chapter takes up a case study of a problem at the social layer: privacy. Privacy showcases issues that can worry individuals who are not concerned about some of the other problems discussed in this book, like copyright infringement, and it demonstrates how generativity puts old problems into new and perhaps unexpected configurations, calling for creative solutions. Once again, we test the notion that solutions that might solve the generative problems at one layer—solutions that go light on law, and instead depend on the cooperative use of code to cultivate and express norms—might also work at another.

The heart of the next-generation privacy problem arises from the similar but uncoordinated actions of individuals that can be combined in new ways thanks to the generative Net. Indeed, the Net enables individuals in many cases to compromise privacy more thoroughly than the government and commercial institutions traditionally targeted for scrutiny and regulation. The standard approaches that have been developed to analyze and limit institutional actors do

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not work well for this new breed of problem, which goes far beyond the compromise of sensitive information.

PRIVACY 1.0 In 1973, a blue-ribbon panel reported to the U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) on computers and privacy. The report could have been written today:

It is no wonder that people have come to distrust computer-based record-keeping operations. Even in non-governmental settings, an individual’s control over the personal information that he gives to an organization, or that an organization obtains about him, is lessening as the relationship between the giver and receiver of personal data grows more attenuated, impersonal, and diffused. There was a time when information about an individual tended to be elicited in face-to-face contacts involving personal trust and a certain symmetry, or balance, between giver and receiver. Nowadays an individual must increasingly give information about himself to large and relatively faceless institutions, for handling and use by strangers—unknown, unseen and, all too frequently, unresponsive. Sometimes the individual does not even know that an organization maintains a record about him. Often he may not see it, much less contest its accuracy, control its dissemination, or challenge its use by others.1

The report pinpointed troubles arising not simply from powerful computing technology that could be used both for good and ill, but also from its impersonal quality: the sterile computer processed one’s warm, three-dimensional life into data handled and maintained by faraway faceless institutions, viewed at will by strangers. The worries of that era are not obsolete. We are still concerned about databases with too much information that are too readily accessed; databases with inaccurate information; and having the data from databases built for reasonable purposes diverted to less noble if not outright immoral uses.2

Government databases remain of particular concern, because of the unique strength and power of the state to amass information and use it for life-altering purposes. The

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