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Objective: Explain the nature of the conflict between privacy, efficiency and innovation. Resolve the conflict with operational and scientific information policies. The index for this section is:
There is a growing body of information policy.
a. Constitution: Explicit-Census every 10 years. Implicit-The right of the legislature to investigate to make laws was something established in the 17th century by Parliament. Because the framers of the Constitution were in agreement concerning the right of the legislature to investigate, this right is never mentioned in the constitution. After some debate in the courts, the bureaucracy now has the right to investigate matters under its purview.
b. Bill of Rights: The fundamental concern of the bill of rights is the abuse of power by government. The first amendment denies the government the right of prior restraint. That is you have the right to say or print something. After the fact you can be sued; however, no one can get an injunction to prevent you from saying or printing something. The Pentagon Papers is an example. The fourth amendment prevents illegal searches and seizures including papers which in the modern world is interpreted to mean your papers. Although some people claim the 9th amendment grants individuals a right of privacy, it is dubious that privacy was a concern in creating the Bill of Rights since privacy in the 1790s was simply not an issue given the primitive technology of the time.
c. Freedom of Information: The most recent round of government information laws is Freedom of Information acts at the federal and state level opening up government files to the citizen. This idea was first promoted by W. Wilson and realized by Nixon's Watergate. Reagan and Bush have tried to circumvent the law.
d. Disclosure policy: Since the progressive period there has been a growing body of legislation requiring disclosures. Examples are: truth in advertising, truth in lending, labeling of food products, security information, and poisons in the workplace.
e. Privacy: Another aspect of information policy is privacy. At the end of the 19th century in response to the yellow journalism, common law precedents were created preventing the use of a likeness and making a distinction between public and private persons. These common law precedents were not designed for the emerging social nervous system and the consequent problems of massive data files. Currently there is a privacy act which provides limited restraint on government. There is no privacy act for private firms.
The problem we face is that information policy must be appropriate for the emerging social nervous system. To understand this problem assume that all decision makers are seated at their terminals. Technically they could look at all of the data collected by society to make their decisions. As computer power increases they will be able to make ever more sophistical analyses. However, their ability to make such analyses is also dependent on their being able to access the requisite data. In as much as the requisite data is frequently held by some other party this raises a fundamental conflict with privacy of the individual, proprietary rights of the firm and the need for governmental secrecy.
There are many aspects to privacy which need to be considered. The first is whether an individual has the right not be disturbed. The second is whether an individual alone or in a group has the right not to be observed. The third is whether political economic agents have the right to disseminate collected information of individuals, firms or governments. The fourth is whether decision makers have the right to use particular information in making a decision. The fifth is who has the responsibility for ensuring the collected information is accurate.
Without privacy delicate business negotiations would be difficult to accomplish. Lovers would be greatly inhibited in their behavior. Many of these issues were considered in the common law rights to privacy which were created to deal with the yellow journalism of the 1890s. However, the advance of information technology has raised new concerns such as the creation of complete transactions histories on individuals. Another vital concern is the advance of knowledge of genes. Is a person just his or her genetic code?
The resolution of this problem determines operational information policy. Decision makers should be able to access information which makes a difference in the decision. Some information such as race, creed, and sex has restricted use in decision making. Whether after seven years bankruptcy information should be removed from credit files is more controversial. Liberals and Conservatives will constantly debated what restrictions should be made on information which makes a difference to promote privacy. Liberals are more likely to grant individuals privacy rights and Conservatives more likely to grant businesses privacy rights.
Finally, we need to consider how to protect individuals, firms and governments from unrestricted flows of information. For individuals trying to prevent the collection of information by other institutions is probably unenforceable because probably cause is required to obtain a search warrant. How then do we protect individuals from abuse of power based on information release? Two approaches are encryption and having decision criterion in the open.
Next, scientists seated at their terminals need to be able to observe the system in order to improve our understanding of political economic behavior. Most current information collected by government is for administrative purposes, for example, taxes. Restrictions such as trade secrets prevent the government from releasing detailed information. Consequently most government information is both expensive to collect and of little use in understanding the behavior of the system. The issue of scientific information policy is to what extent should scientists be able to obtain representative samples of observations of political economic behavior that they are studying. These representative samples do not need to contain labels identifying the subject in order to reveal relationships in the behavior of the sample.
The advance in information technology and communications networks such as the Net have greatly increased many social thinkers concern for the loss in privacy. I could not find any information on the increase in economic efficiency.
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norman@eco.utexas.edu