Taking Privacy Seriously: How to Create the Rights We Need While We Still Have Something to Protect

Summary

A STEP-BY-STEP PROGRAM TO CREATE A MORE PRIVATE AND EGALITARIAN DIGITAL WORLD

Taking Privacy Seriously offers both a hard-hitting assessment of the origins of today’s privacy-eroding practices and a robust road map for creating individual authority over our personal data. James B. Rule proposes eleven key reforms in the control and use of personal information—including far-reaching new rights for individuals and meaningful responsibilities for data-keeping organizations—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 proposed reforms include the creation of websites that publicly document what organizations are holding what forms of personal data; the establishment of a right for citizens to withdraw from personal data systems not required by law; and the institution of a universal property right over commercial exploitation of data on oneself—so that no organization could profit from the 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.

“This book is direct, impatient (in the best way possible), and urgent. It doesn’t waste time summarizing all the things we already know about privacy in the United States, but instead asks, What is to be done? We need a book like this.”—David Murakami Wood, Professor, Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa