The Digital Person - Technology and Privacy in the Information Age

Author : Daniel J. Solove, George Washington University Law School
Publisher : New York University Press
Publication Date : 2004
License : Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

Excerpts from the Introduction:

We are in the midst of an information revolution, and we are only beginning to understand its implications. The past few decades have witnessed a dramatic transformation in the way we shop, bank, and go about our daily business—changes that have resulted in an unprecedented proliferation of records and data. Small details that were once captured in dim memories or fading scraps of paper are now preserved forever in the digital minds of computers, in vast databases with fertile fields of personal data. Our wallets are stuffed with ATM cards, calling cards, frequent shopper cards, and credit cards—all of which can be used to record where we are and what we do. Every day, rivulets of information stream into electric brains to be sifted, sorted, rearranged, and combined in hundreds of different ways. Digital technology enables the preservation of the minutia of our everyday comings and goings, of our likes and dislikes, of who we are and what we own. It is ever more possible to create an electronic collage that covers much of a person's life—a life captured in records, a digital person composed in the collective computer networks of the world.

We are currently confronting the rise of what I refer to as "digital dossiers." A dossier is a collection of detailed data about an individual. Dossiers are used in European courts to assemble information about a person in order to reach a judgment. Today, through the use of computers, dossiers are being constructed about all of us. Data is digitized into binary numerical form, which enables computers to store and manipulate it with unprecedented efficiency. There are hundreds of companies that are constructing gigantic databases of psychological profiles, amassing data about an individual's race, gender, income, hobbies, and purchases. Shards of data from our daily existence are now being assembled and analyzed—to investigate backgrounds, check credit, market products, and make a wide variety of decisions affecting our lives.

This book is about how we should understand and protect privacy in light of these profound technological developments. Our old conceptions of privacy are not up to the task. Much of the law pertaining to privacy is based on these conceptions, and as a result, it has failed to resolve the emerging privacy problems created by digital dossiers. This book aims to rethink longstanding notions of privacy to grapple with the consequences of living in an Information Age.

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