Communications of the ACM

world dominated by inverse privacy is not the invasion of privacy (the tremendous importance of that issue notwithstanding) but the gross disparity in the capability to take and keep records.

The Inverse Privacy
Entitlement Principle

Enterprises have legitimate reason to collect data about their customers; this allows them to serve their customers better. Medical institutions have legitimate reasons to collect data about their patients; this helps them diagnose and treat diseases. Governments have legitimate reason to collect data about their citizens; this helps them address societal problems.

As noted earlier, institutions are much better than individuals in collecting data. So, in the process of all the collection of data about customers, patients, and citizens, partially private data is quickly becoming inversely private. Aside from any surreptitious collection of personal information, this conversion of data from partially private to inversely private is critical to the provenance of inversely private information.

Access to your inversely private infons would allow you to correct possible errors in the data, to have a better idea of your health status and your credit rating, and so on.

From an ethical point of view, it is only fair to give you access to your personal infons. Already the 1973 HEW report16 advocated that “[t]here must be no personal-data record-keeping systems whose very existence is secret,” and “[t]here must be a way for an individual, to find out what information about him is in a record and how it is used.” And the 1970 Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) stipulated that, subject to various technical exceptions, “[e]very consumer reporting agency shall, upon request, … clearly and accurately disclose to the consumer” all information in the consumer’s file, the sources of the information, and so on. 6

Concentrating on the big picture, we ignore technical exceptions here.

But we cannot ignore that govern-
ments have legitimate security con-
cerns, and businesses have legitimate
competition concerns. The 2012 Fed-
eral Trade Commission (FTC) report
by and large, the people knew about
their taxes as much as the government
did. Traditionally, the partial privacy
bucket easily dominated the inverse
privacy bucket.

Later on, governments, especially dictatorial governments, could marshal resources to collect information on people; a novelist illustrated this power the best. 13 The most radical change, however, is due to technology introduced in the last 20–30 years. The capacity of public and private institutions to take and keep records became vastly superior to that of a regular person. As a result, the large majority of items in the personal infoset is now generated as inversely or partially private. Often infons start as partially private but then quickly decay into inversely private because the institutions remember it all while the person often hardly remembers that the interaction took place.

For a regular citizen of an advanced society today, the volume of the inverse privacy bucket vastly exceeds that of the partial privacy bucket. Of course it may be simplistic to count bits or even items. A picture of a car has many bits but only so much useful information; even many pictures of the same car may have only so much useful information. It makes more sense to speak about the value of information rather than its volume.

Determining the value of personal information is a difficult problem, particularly because of a gap between what people are willing to pay for keeping an item of information directly private and what they are willing to accept for sharing that same item of information; see Acquisti et al. 1 and its references. Nevertheless, we posit that typically the value of the inverse privacy bucket exceeds that of the partial privacy bucket and grows much faster.

Thus, in advanced societies today, the inverse privacy bucket of a typical personal infoset dominates the whole infoset. We see the dominance of inverse privacy as a problem. In this connection, it is important to understand legal, political, sociological, ethical, technological implications of the inverse privacy domination.