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Priscilla M. Regan, Privacy and the Common Good: Revisited

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Priscilla M. Regan, Privacy and the Common Good: Revisited

Comment by: Kenneth Bamberger

PLSC 2013

Workshop draft abstract:

In Legislating Privacy: Technology, Social Values, and Public Policy (1995), I argued that privacy is not only of value to the individual but also to society in general and I suggested three bases for the social importance of privacy. First that privacy is a common value in that all individuals value some degree of privacy and have some common perceptions about privacy. Second that privacy is a public value in that it has value to the democratic political process. And, third that privacy is a collective value in that technology and market forces are making it hard for any one person to have privacy without all persons having a similar minimum level of privacy.

In this paper, I will first reflect briefly on the major developments that have affected public policy and philosophical thinking about privacy over the last fifteen plus years. Most prominently, these include: (1) the rather dramatic technological changes in online activities including social networking, powerful online search engines, and the quality of the merging of video/data/voice applications; (2) the rise of surveillance activities in the post-9/11 world; and (3) the rapid globalization of cultural, political and economic activities.  As our everyday activities become more interconnected and seemingly similar across national boundaries, interests in privacy and information policies more generally tend also to cross these boundaries and provide a shared public and philosophical bond.

Then, I will turn attention to each of the three bases for the social importance of privacy reviewing the new literature that has furthered philosophical thinking on this topic, including works by Helen Nissenbaum, Beate Roessler, and Valerie Steeves.

Finally, I will revisit my thinking on each of the three philosophical bases for privacy – expanding and refining what I mean by each, examining how each has fared over the last fifteen years, analyzing whether each is still a legitimate and solid bases for the social importance of privacy, and considering whether new bases for privacy’s social importance have emerged today. In this section, I am particularly interested in developing more fully both the logic behind privacy as a collective value and the implications for viewing privacy from that perspective.

Torin Monahan & Priscilla M. Regan, Fusion Centers Information Sharing: Revisiting Reliance on Suspicious Activity Reports

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Torin Monahan & Priscilla M. Regan, Fusion Centers Information Sharing: Revisiting Reliance on Suspicious Activity Reports

Comment by: Ron Lee

PLSC 2012

Workshop draft abstract:

Interviews, with fusion center officials, conducted as part of our NSF funded research, reveal that Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) are often mentioned as a way of collecting and sharing information.  Law enforcement has been using some form of SARs for decades, collected through a variety of mechanisms including hotlines, 911 calls, neighborhood watches, schools and community centers, etc.  The value and reliability of such reporting have often been questioned, especially as their use expands in ways that will likely result in an overload of information of dubious quality requiring a large investment of time to investigate. (Nojeim, 2009; Randol 2009, ACLU 2010)  Despite these concerns, SARs have persisted as a tool of community oriented policing and as a practical tool for collecting information and raising public awareness (Steiner 2010).  Since its creation, DHS has adopted SARs in its counter-terrorism activities, with the newest SARs version being Secretary Napolitano’s, “If You See Something, Say Something Campaign.”

Our interviews indicate that SARs reporting is labor intensive and generally does not yield useful information.  An official at one state level fusion center stated “A lot of our activity on the counter-terrorism side is responding to suspicious activity reports…I would say an overwhelming majority of the reports that we get are, once we do a little bit of checking,  we can determine that they, that the person had a reason to be doing what they were doing – and those get closed out and we don’t pursue those any further.”  An official at another center estimated that the center received “in the realm of four hundred to five hundred SARs a year…the SARs are not necessarily all terrorism, but some are.”

Notwithstanding the widely recognized limitations of SARs, they do continue to be used.  This paper will investigate why they continue to be used in intelligence gathering, how and when they are be used in fusion centers, what the policy landscape for their use currently is, what revisions to that landscape might be necessary, and what intelligence gathering alternatives to SARs exist.

danah boyd & Alice Marwick: Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens’ Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies

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danah boyd & Alice Marwick: Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens’ Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies

Comment by: Priscilla Regan

PLSC 2011

Published version available here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1925128

Workshop draft abstract:

When 17-year-old Carmen broke up with her boyfriend, she wanted her friends to know that she was feeling sad.  Her initial instinct was to post sappy song lyrics to her Facebook, but she decided against doing so out of fear that her mother would think she was suicidal.  On Facebook, Carmen is friends with her mother and while her mother knew about the breakup, Carmen knew her mother had a tendency to overreact.  As a solution, she decided to post lyrics from “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”  Her geeky friends immediately recognized the song from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” and knew that the song was sung when the main character was about to be executed.  Her mother, on the other hand, did not realize that the words were a song lyric, let alone know the film reference.  She took the words literally and posted a comment on Carmen’s profile, noting that she seemed to be doing really well.  Her friends, knowing the full backstory, texted her.

The technique that Carmen takes can best be understood as “social steganography.” Steganography is an ancient tactic of hiding information in plain sight.  It’s the ultimate “security through obscurity.” Long before cryptography, the Greeks were notorious for using steganography – hiding messages in wax tablets, tattooing the heads of slaves and then sending them to their destination once their hair has grown back, etc. Steganography isn’t powerful because of strong encryption. It’s powerful because people don’t think to look for a hidden message. In a networked society, privacy isn’t going to be about controlling or limiting access. It’s going to be about controlling and limiting meaning.

As teens use sites like Facebook to socialize with peers, they struggle to manage diverse audiences simultaneously.  Facing collapsed contexts and social expectations, they are unable to segment their personal networks to maintain distinct social roles.  Instead, they use techniques like social stenography, limiting access to meaning instead of access to content. They use song lyrics, in-jokes, and external referents to encode messages that only have meaning to those “in the know.”  Their practices, while not new, allow teens to achieve privacy in public in new ways through social media.  Social stenography is just one of the techniques that teens take to manage privacy while living very public lives through social media.

This article will explore various techniques that teens take in order to examine the core practices of privacy in everyday life and the implications of emergent social norms on legal and technical discourse surrounding privacy. The argument leverages ethnographic data concerning American teen social media practices and situates the argument in a discussion of counterpublics (Warner 2002), symbols as subcultural signals (Chauncey 1995), civil inattention (Goffman 1959), and privacy as a contextual process (Gavison 1980; Nissenbaum 2009). The analysis then interrogates conflicts between people’s practices and both the design of technical systems and also the legal constructs for addressing privacy.  I will argue that the techniques that teens take to manage privacy are rooted in a model of “networked privacy” that doesn’t mesh well with the individual-centric nature of technological privacy settings or legal notions of harm.

Priscilla M. Regan & Gerald FitzGerald, Generational Views of Privacy?

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Priscilla M. Regan & Gerald FitzGerald, Generational Views of Privacy?

Comment by: Mary Culnan

PLSC 2010

Workshop draft abstract:

There is a growing body of social science research about the behavior and attitudes of young people online (Valentine and Halloway 2002, Livingstone and Bober 2003, Steeves 2006) and especially in social-networking sites, such as Facebook (Lenhart and Madden 2007).  I propose to expand on that research in several ways: by focusing on privacy rather than on a larger set of values; by examining attitudes rather than behavior; and by comparing attitudes across age groups rather than examining a specific age group in detail.  Specifically, I propose to perform an age cohort analysis of responses to “concern about privacy and technology” using data from a range of public opinion surveys beginning in the early 1980s and including the privacy surveys of Alan Westin and Lou Harris, and the Pew Internet and American Life surveys.  The goal of this part of the research is to determine if there are indeed generational patterns in concerns about privacy, to identify consistencies and disjunctures among generational attitudes, and to determine how these patterns have emerged over time.  Although scholars have analyzed changes in concern about privacy over time (Gandy 2003), no one has examined how age cohorts’ views of privacy are different or similar and how those age cohorts’ views change or endure over time.  The central argument/hypothesis of this research is that as generations increasingly use computer and information technologies in seamlessly mediating their online and offline worlds they see these technologies as integral to their way of “presenting themselves” (Goffman 1959) and that this in turn causes/contributes to a fundamental change in the way the generations conceptualize privacy as a value in their lives.