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.
It is worth emphasizing that the
main reason that we live now in a
ACM Conference
Proceedings
Now Available via
Print-on-Demand!
Did you know that you can
now order many popular
ACM conference proceedings
via print-on-demand?
Institutions, libraries and
individuals can choose
from more than 100 titles
on a continually updated
list through Amazon, Barnes
& Noble, Baker & Taylor,
Ingram and NACSCORP:
CHI, KDD, Multimedia,
SIGIR, SIGCOMM, SIGCSE,
SIGMOD/PODS,
and many more.
For available titles and
ordering info, visit:
librarians.acm.org/pod
ACM Conference
Proceedings
Now Available via
Print-on-Demand!