The ABFFE Book of the Month for August is Frederick S. Lane's American Privacy: The 400-Year History of Our Most Contested Right (Beacon Press) (978-0807044414).

Interview with Frederick S. Lane

ABFFE: You describe the right to privacy as our most contested right. When did this struggle begin?

Frederick S. Lane: I chose the subtitle "The 400-Year-History of Our Most Contested Right" because of the battle over privacy in this country can be traced back to the efforts of the early Puritans to avoid government oppression and surveillance in Elizabethan England due to their unpopular religious beliefs. More than 150 years later, that concept found expression in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The tension between personal privacy and government policy is longstanding.                                                          Photo by Jordan S. Douglas

For most individuals, however, the real struggle over personal privacy did not begin until the introduction of technology that made it possible for privacy to be easily invaded. The camera is the most graphic example of that, an invention that led directly to the proposal of a "right to privacy" by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis. But others quickly followed, including the telephone, the credit card, and eventually, computers.

ABFFE: Why should we care about privacy? What do we lose if privacy disappears?

FSL: This is a question that I often am asked at lectures and book talks.
Many students in particular wonder whether they should be concerned about privacy if they're not doing anything wrong. That's an echo of a campaign slogan that British prime minister John Major used in the early 1980's: "If You've Got Nothing to Hide, You've Got Nothing to Fear." The slogan referred to his proposal to install CCTV cameras in public spaces, the first steps towards making Britain today the most-watched nation in the western hemisphere.

We should care about privacy because it is a measure of our autonomy in the world. Perhaps in some ideal world, there would be total and complete transparency, and information would not have the power that it does today. But information does have power, and that power can be misused by governments, organizations, and even individuals. We should defend privacy because what we are actually preserving is our ability to control, within reason, what information we share with people in various aspects of our lives.

The examples run from the profound to the banal. We might not want our employer to know about a serious medical condition because that information might, however subtly, affect our job prospects. And we might not want Starbucks to know we're walking past yet another outlet because we don't want ads cluttering our cell phones.

ABFFE: What role does privacy play in protecting free speech?

FSL: As the Puritans experienced so long ago, the concept of privacy is central to core personal freedoms like religion, association, and speech. If a government is opposed to an individual's beliefs and can invade his or her privacy at will, the information collected can be used to harass or oppress that individual. There are numerous examples of this throughout American history, but the most egregious, perhaps, was the Nixon administration's use of military personnel to spy on and collect information about leftist radicals in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That information was then fed to other federal agencies and used to launch audits, deny federal job applications, deny student loans, and various other types of bureaucratic harassment.

ABFFE: How did the 9/11 attacks affect privacy?

FSL: In addition to being a human, political, and environmental disaster, 9/11 was also a catastrophe for individual privacy. Even before the attack, there were elements in the Bush administration and in Congress that were eager to dramatically expand the surveillance and information-gathering capabilities of the federal government. Within days (literally) of the attack, a comprehensive package was submitted to Congress that partially or substantially rolled back pro-privacy protections that had been painstakingly achieved over the past 30 years. Despite the fact that 9/11 was not a failure of domestic intelligence, it was (and still is) used as an excuse not only to undercut long-standing privacy protections, but also to conduct actual investigations in ways that even Patriot Act proponents might question as unduly invasive.

ABFFE: Besides government, what threatens privacy?

FSL: Apart from the government, the two biggest threats to privacy are commerce and reality TV shows. The first refers to the fact that businesses are desperately seeking ways to profitably advertise in our increasingly-wired world, and the general assumption is that the more information a business knows about someone, the more targeted (and thus cost-effective) an advertisement can be. The ultimate objective is to serve an advertisement to a person at the precise moment that they are most likely to want to make the purchase. That objective hinges in large part on knowing where someone is, either on the Web (through the use of cookies) or in the real world (through tracking of GPS signals). As consumers, we all too often opt-into this scenario for ridiculously low rewards: a coupon here, a discount there. We are far too complicit in corporate efforts to invade our privacy.

And that's particularly true online. I cite reality TV shows as a metaphor for the Warholian desire for our 15 minutes of fame. It is astounding the information, photos, and videos of themselves that people post online, with no real appreciation for how difficult (read impossible) it is to retrieve anything from the Web. Initially, of course, an argument can be made that when people choose to post things about themselves online, they are exercising autonomy and control, and are free to publicize whatever aspects of their lives they want. The problem, of course, is that control of the information quickly vanishes, and online information can be used in ways that people don't anticipate. Moreover, we often can't control the information that other people post about us (see, for instance, the Facebook group "* 30 Reasons Girls Should Call It a Night *," which features photos of inebriated individuals, mostly women, posted to Facebook by their "friends").

ABFFE: Is it too late to save privacy? What can we do to preserve it?

FSL: One of the challenges in talking about privacy is that we all have such different definitions what "privacy" actually means, so I don't think that there's much mileage in trying to "save" a fairly nebulous concept -- the idea of "privacy" will continue to exist despite our actions to the contrary. I do believe, however, that it is useful talk about privacy in the context of controlling information -- what can we do to enhance and protect our ability to control the release and spread of information. In part, that's a call for personal responsibility; we each need to stop and think about whether we really need a 5 cent coupon in exchange for letting a grocery store track our purchases throughout the year. But even more importantly, I think that the control of personal information is a sufficiently large issue to merit government regulation. We've done it before, with food, and medicine, and the environment. We can do the same thing with the control of personal information. Let's create a Federal Privacy Protection Agency that is committed to effectively regulating government and corporate collection and use of private information, and that can educate the public about the risks of broadcasting too much, too often.

To read about other Book of the Month selections, click here.