Scott Peppet’s article Unraveling Privacy: The Personal Prospectus & the Threat of a Full Disclosure Future has offered a fundamental challenge to reigning privacy paradigms in cyberlaw. The old privacy law assumed that the right set of laws could help individuals hide embarrassing facts or disable invasive tracking. The encroaching “full disclosure future” ensures that those who try to maintain secrets look like they have “something to hide.” We used to be afraid of shadowy watchers collecting incriminating “digital dossiers;” now we worry over not measuring up when rivals reveal better “personal prospectuses” than our own. Peppet’s elegant interweaving of social science and law renders us unable to rely on old privacy paradigms like “notice and consent” online.
Something to Hide
Traditionally, privacy law experts have assumed that a combination of markets and law can preserve privacy. Firms will compete to offer more or less privacy. Data collectors will provide customers with various “privacy settings” that tailor online services to optimize self-disclosure. Some have proposed “personal data vaults” to manage the emanations of sensor networks that track movements and actions in real space. Jonathan Zittrain’s classic article on “privication” proposed that the same technologies used by copyrightholders to monitor or stop dissemination of works could be adopted by patients concerned about the unauthorized spread of health information. Continue reading "The End of “Notice and Consent” as Meaningful Privacy Protection"
