Aryana Libris

Authors : Kerr Ian - Steeves Valerie - Lucock Carole
Title : Lessons from the identity trail Anonymity, privacy and identity in a network society
Year : 2009

Link download : Kerr_Ian_-_Steeves_Valerie_-_Lucock_Carole_-_Lessons_from_the_identity_trail.zip

In the 1970s, Western countries began to grapple with the social implications of new information technologies. Mainframe computers enabled a very few large institutions to collect vast amounts of data about individuals. Many began to worry that these databases would inexorably erode our privacy and subject us to increasingly totalitarian methods of social control. As a corrective, American legal scholar Alan Westin articulated a set of fair information practices to give individuals some level of procedural control over their personal information. Almost forty years later, these fair information practices have become the standard for privacy protection around the world. And yet, over that same time period, we have seen an exponential growth in the use of surveillance technologies, and our daily interactions are now routinely captured, recorded, and manipulated by small and large institutions alike. This section begins with a critical examination of the crux of the fair information practices paradigm, the notion that individuals will be able to protect their privacy if their information can only be collected, used, and disclosed with their consent. Ian Kerr, jennifer barrigar, Jacquelyn Burkell, and Katie Black examine the ways in which the consent-gathering process is often engineered to skew individual decision-making, in effect creating an illusion of free choice that helps to legitimatize surveillance practices. Drawing on interdisciplinary work in psychology and decision theory, these contributors argue that the current threshold for consent with respect to the collection, use, and disclosure of personal information is not high enough to protect us from corporate initiatives that invade our privacy. Philippa Lawson and Mary O’Donoghue examine the same question from a legal perspective, by canvassing the use of consent in Canadian privacy laws in both public sector and private sector contexts. Although private sector legislation provides more scope for negotiation between collectors and individuals, the authors caution that our current reliance on consent as the gold standard for privacy protection may be misplaced because the exercise of that consent is often more notional than real. Alex Cameron looks at the unintended consequences of fair information practices in the context of digital rights management (DRM) software. He begins with the hypothesis that DRM impedes the individual’s right to enjoy creative works in private. He then concludes that the consent provisions in data protection laws may be ineffective in constraining the surveillance capacities of DRMprotected works, in effect making it harder to create an appropriate balance between property rights and privacy rights in digitized spaces. ...