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Why Are We Concerned About Online Privacy?

NYU professor discusses the implications of surreptitious monitoring and behavioral advertising.

The expectation of privacy that people have in the "real world" is largely the same as that which we have for our digital identities, but it differs in many important ways that deserve urgent attention, a lecturer said Tuesday at Stanford.

Helen Nissenbaum, professor of Media, Culture and Communication and Computer Science at New York University, asserted that when people complain and protest that their privacy has been violated, the  are really concerned about inappropriate, improper sharing of information.

Her lecture at the Stanford Law School for the Center for Internet and Society (CIS) was called, “Why privacy online is different, and why it isn’t.”

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Nissenbaum pointed to the words of John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation who maintained that "businesses you never heard of can own the history of your personal affairs.”

Nissenbaum said she regards the online world as different with respect to privacy, because of ambiguous contexts, disrupted flows and violations of entrenched norms. For example, as a subscriber to The New York Times in print, she doesn't have to worry about anyone tracking what articles she reads. But by switching to the online edition, her reading habits could be automatically recorded and entered into a huge database and distributed to other entities.

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Blue Kai, for example, is a company that claims to have “ushered in a ‘data renaissance,'" Nissenbaum said. "For the first time in history, advertisers can target individual consumers independent of their media choices.”

If people don’t want to have their personal data shared with third parties, they can search for a website’s privacy policy—often hard to find or in small type—and attempt to read and understand the lengthy, abstruse and loophole-rich prose and choose to opt-in or out of consent. Nissenbaum said she would like to see an informed consent statement reduced to the simplicity of a nutrition label.

She referred to an article in Scientific American that found most people don’t read consent forms. She, herself, a lawyer, admitted signing forms at a hospital without reading them.

Nissenbaum described online as a “highly heterogeneous media space, which is thickly integrated into social life, in general.” Banking, commerce, education, tax returns, social communication, civic engagement and research are some of the activities in which personal data is streaming over the Web.

She said privacy concerns should not be limited solely to concern about control over personal information. The distribution and protection of information ought to follow norms governing distinct social contexts—whether it be workplace, health care, schools or among family and friends. Contexts, defined by Nissenbaum, are structured spheres of social life characterized by practices, roles, norms, goals and values.

Context-relative informational norms (CRINs) have key variables: actors (sender, recipient, subject), information types and transmission principles (constraints). “Technology has a huge impact on disrupting some of the norms,” Nissenbaum said. “But technology doesn’t impose new norms or determine morality.”

She quoted Google co-founder Larry Page, who in 1997 wrote, “The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. … the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.” 

Nissenbaum advocates seeking a balance of market norms with internal standards of excellence.

This lecture marked a return to “the farm” for Nissenbaum. She received her Ph.D. in philosophy at Stanford. Her lecture was based on concepts detailed in her 2009 book, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life, published by Stanford University Press.

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