Anne Branscomb's Who Owns Information? includes all the information-privacy horror stories you could ask for. Unfortunately, just as each round of stirring Big Brother rhetoric reaches its climax, she drops in a bit of fishy logic (some people are just delighted to get those catalogs, that's just the price of modern medicine, and so on) purporting to explain why the problems are more complicated than you ever really thought.
The book is informative - sometimes. Details of the disputes over control of the Dead Sea Scrolls and scrambling of satellite TV transmissions are finally assembled. More often, though, it feels confusing, lacking a conceptual framework and showing startling omissions: Branscomb brushes past or skips altogether such topics as software patents, privacy torts, pre-employment background checks, trade secrets, noncompetition clauses, the European and Canadian data-protection regimes, the Fair Information Practices, and "opt-in" schemes that prevent secondary uses of your personal information without your express consent.
Read the final chapter first to get Branscomb's agenda. She asserts, for example, that people should own their names and addresses, reducing informational privacy to a property right. Although this is an appealing proposition in the abstract - and might form one part of a larger puzzle - huge questions go unasked. First of all, what does this even mean? And secondly, what protection would such a right really offer in a world in which an individual cannot get insurance, medical care, a drivers license, or a job without having to sign it away? Perhaps, contrary to appearances, her proposal would provide legal armor for the inequities of the status quo by legitimizing these kinds of unfair contractual arrangements. Indeed, the only consequence that Branscomb derives from the view of names and addresses as property is that the industry should undertake voluntary programs to give people a sense that they're negotiating over the use of their personal information.
Branscomb's right about one thing: these issues will soon be up for grabs in a legislature near you. The information industry will be investing money and effort getting organized and making its views known. Will you?
Who Owns Information?: From Privacy to Public Access, by Anne Wells Branscomb: US$25. BasicBooks: (800) 331 3761, +1 (212) 207 7000.
STREET CRED
Sega's Tokyo JoypolisCD Rights
Who Owns Information?
