CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts – In an Internet age of cookies, webcams, and pay-per-peek voyeurism, do we even have any privacy left to protect?
The answer: It depends on whom you ask.
During a conference at Harvard University on Thursday, privacy advocates argued for restrictions on publishing information.
"There's a privacy interest even in things that take place in public, especially in this age of webcams," Robert Ellis Smith, publisher of the Privacy Journal, said during an afternoon panel at the Internet and Society 2000 conference.
Some state governments have set up webcams that monitor busy and accident-prone highway interchanges, a practice that Smith said goes too far.
But Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union, said that the Internet should not be subject to more restrictions than print or broadcasting.
"The same First Amendment principles that apply to traditional media should apply here," Strossen said.
Privacy and free speech rights have long been in opposition, or at least in tension: Free speech means you can talk about someone else, but a privacy right might let someone else stop you from publishing.
An influential 1890 article published in the Harvard Law Review complains that free speech rights must give way to privacy.
"The press is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency. Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious, but has become a trade, which is pursued with industry as well as effrontery," wrote the authors, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis.
Brandeis eventually became a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
The reason for their ire? The tabloid press of the day was airing gossip about Warren's daughter's wedding.
On the Harvard panel, members seemed to agree that the federal government should release "worst case" accident information it requires chemical companies to submit.
Under a compromise proposal reached in April, Americans can visit local government offices and view the information, but not take copies or obtain the chemical release data in electronic form.
"People in my district do want to know if there's lead in the soil," said Marie St. Fleur, a Massachusetts state representative.
The FBI and other law enforcement agencies have said terrorists – think Libya and Iraq – could compile the information and use it to target chemical plants.
"If the attitude that information could be misused was a rationale for suppressing it, we wouldn't have a Freedom of Information Act. We wouldn't have public libraries," Strossen said.
But a few minutes later, under pointed questioning from panel moderator Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Strossen said that if the situtation involved criminal records being placed on a government website, she would err on the side of nondisclosure.
"I do not think that public safety is enhanced by having that information out there," Strossen said.
Privacy Journal's Smith said he would go even further.
"Why couldn't journalists and the government agree on an intermediary to analyze the data?" he asked.
