Taking Privacy Seriously

Book excerpt: Other books remind us of what we already know--that privacy is under great pressure. James Rule provides a step-by-step plan to create a significantly more private and authentically democratic world. Taking Privacy Seriously offers both a concise, hard-hitting assessment of the origins of today's privacy-eroding practices and a roadmap for creating robust new individual rights over our personal data. Rule proposes eleven key reforms in the control and use of personal information, all aimed at redressing the balance of power between ordinary citizens and data-hungry corporate and government institutions. What a privacy-deprived America needs most is not less technology, Rule argues, but profound political realignment. His eleven proposed reforms range from launching a major public-works investment consisting of a series of websites publicly documenting the personal data uses of nearly all government and private institutions; to instating a right for any citizen to withdraw from any personal data system not required by law; to creating a universal property right over commercial exploitation of data on oneself--so that no company or other organization could profit from use or sale of such data without permission. Succinct and compelling, Taking Privacy Seriously explains how we can refashion information technologies so that they serve human needs, not the other way around.