From the course: Ethics and Law in Data Analytics

Privacy, privilege, or right

From the course: Ethics and Law in Data Analytics

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Privacy, privilege, or right

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- The human right to privacy is quite simply the right to be let alone. There are two aspects to this right, decisional privacy and informational privacy. Decisional privacy is the right to be let alone with respect to how we live our lives, who we partner with, how we raise our children, what medical treatment we accept and reject. This right is most affected by government actions that attempt to restrict the full expression of privacy by citizens. For example, attempts by states in the United States to restrict the right to reproductive freedom for women raised the issue of the right to privacy, and because these cases are about government restrictions, they concern the right to privacy as it is protected by the US Constitution. Informational privacy is the right to be let alone with respect to information or data that reveals knowledge about us. Sensitive information, such as Social Security numbers, race, gender, religion, health data, including fitness levels, genetic data, all of this information reveals a part of who we are. Outside of constitutional protections against government actions that restrict our privacy, most of the law that protects privacy, particularly informational privacy, is protected by sector in the United States. There is not one overarching rule that otherwise protects individuals from having their information accessed, used, or shared without their consent. Instead, the statutes protect sectors of information. And so there are laws that protect our health data, our financial data, student data, credit data, and even our genetic data from being accessed, used, and shared without our permission. The limitation of these laws is that they are very specific. For example, the Genetic Information Privacy Act, otherwise known as GINA, protects against access use and sharing genetic information by employers and insurance companies. In the context of new technology, such as data analytics and AI, these existing laws will need to get stretched in their application. Finally, in the US, there is common law that protects privacy in an area of law called torts. We've already seen torts in our discussion of negligence law. Tort law, intentional tort law, protects individuals from wrongs committed by another that cause physical, financial, and emotional harm. When a person or organization intrudes into areas where we have a reason to expect privacy, or accesses and shares personal information that we expect to be able to keep personal, then there may be a civil lawsuit claiming damages for that harm. All this said about privacy law in the US, the current story of US privacy law may be that at least Americans consider it to be more of a privilege than a right. The willingness of individuals in the United States to share forth their information in transactional exchanges online, in fitness challenges at work, and on social media, like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and dating sites, suggests that there's an evolution of how we consider information that is intimately personal to us. What happens, however, when we come to learn that all of this personal data is being accumulated to create what privacy scholars like Daniel Solove call, digital biographies about us, and all of a sudden technologies are having a hand in defining the very persons that we are because we are so willing to share that information, it becomes harder to argue that we have any expectation of privacy in the data at all.

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