Privacy Concerns Around "Social Reading"
Interesting paper: “The Perils of Social Reading,” by Neil M. Richards, from the Georgetown Law Journal.
Abstract: Our law currently treats records of our reading habits under two contradictory rules rules mandating confidentiality, and rules permitting disclosure. Recently, the rise of the social Internet has created more of these records and more pressures on when and how they should be shared. Companies like Facebook, in collaboration with many newspapers, have ushered in the era of “social reading,” in which what we read may be “frictionlessly shared” with our friends and acquaintances. Disclosure and sharing are on the rise.
This Article sounds a cautionary note about social reading and frictionless sharing. Social reading can be good, but the ways in which we set up the defaults for sharing matter a great deal. Our reader records implicate our intellectual privacy the protection of reading from surveillance and interference so that we can read freely, widely, and without inhibition. I argue that the choices we make about how to share have real consequences, and that “frictionless sharing” is not frictionless, nor it is really sharing. Although sharing is important, the sharing of our reading habits is special. Such sharing should be conscious and only occur after meaningful notice.
The stakes in this debate are immense. We are quite literally rewiring the public and private spheres for a new century. Choices we make now about the boundaries between our individual and social selves, between consumers and companies, between citizens and the state, will have unforeseeable ramifications for the societies our children and grandchildren inherit. We should make choices that preserve our intellectual privacy, not destroy it. This Article suggests practical ways to do just that.
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Ben • May 23, 2012 7:51 AM
It’s not just “social reading”.
Imagine what the Maoists or Leninists would have done with your Amazon purchase history.
What’s that? You purchased “Wealth of Nations” 15 years ago? To the re-education camp with you!
Nor is the the nature of the information. It’s not qualitatively different from information we would be happy sharing – it’s basically the same stuff we would tell anyone.
But “quantity has a quality all its own”, as Stalin is reputed to have said.
Harmless information, held in bulk, is no longer harmless.