Contemporary Privacy Issues - The Broadened Public Issue - The Research Center on Computing & Society

Text-only Version

Willis H. Ware

1. Introduction
2. Historical Development
3. United States Posture
4. Source of the Problem
5. Privacy as a Public Policy Issue
6. Contemporary Privacy
6.1 Current Example
7. Public Policy Again
7.1 An Illustration – CNI
8. The Broadened Public Issue
9. Possible Approaches to Protection
10. Related Effects
11. Privacy as Social Equity
12. New Privacy Versus Old
13. Context for New Privacy
14. Privacy Versus Public Distaste
15. The Future for Privacy
16. References

The Broadened Public Issue

Are there other examples of such implicitly made public policy? Yes, indeed. The most obvious one underlies the entire discussion of contemporary privacy. The present information industry has made it de facto public policy that use of personal information without pre-knowledge of the data subject, without visibility to the data subject, and totally outside his control is appropriate behavior for profit-making industry. It is a complete negation of the Fair Code of Information Practices except in the few instances for which law happens to have been passed.

Without doubt, it is time to realize that the private sector has become a very prominent “opponent and potential source of problems” in terms of how personal information is used, what effect it has on people, how widely it is shared, and the implicit public policy that is being made. We surely now must put the private sector and the government on equal terms so far as utilization and exploitation of personal information is concerned, each with potential for abuse and misuse, and each with different effects on public policy and social mores.

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