Subject: [ietf-privacy] fyi: Databuse: Digital Privacy and the Mosaic

From: =JeffH <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2011 06:22:28 -0700

Databuse: Digital Privacy and the Mosaic
by Benjamin Wittes
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/papers/2011/0401_databuse_wittes/0401_databuse_wittes.pdf

Conclusion

We debate mosaic issues in the language of privacy because privacy is the only 
word we've got. It is not, however, the value we are implementing in fact as a 
society or the value that we really expect as individuals from the companies 
and governments with which we interact. That value is something else—something 
that lacks a name in common parlance but amounts to an expectation against 
hostile, deceptive, or negligent use and handling of data we entrust to third 
parties. It is an expectation that our data will work for us, not against us, 
and that while our interests won't always be congruent with those who hold the 
tiles of our mosaics, the custodians of our tiles owe us consideration—at least 
to do us no harm.

This is not privacy. It is something else. The sooner we accept that in 
discussing these issues, we are not operating inside of Brandeis's privacy 
framework but, rather, engaging in the very project he undertook—that is, 
imagining new legal categories for new surveillance challenges wrought by 
technology—the sooner we will confront them effectively and in a fashion that 
satisfies the many competing interests at stake in the mosaic.

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