Page 22 - Privacy in a Cyber Age Policy and Practice

A CYBER AGE PRIVACY DOCTRINE 7

identifying information (e.g., names, addresses and Social Security num-
bers) when researchers need medical records, which would make it possible
to allow access to previously inaccessible data (e.g., Medicare databanks).
Various technical difficulties arise in securing the anonymity of the data.
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Several ingenious suggestions have been made to cope with this challenge.
Conversely, if privacy needs shoring up, one should look for ways to proceed,
such as introducing audit trails, that impose no “losses” to the common good.
Third, to the extent that privacy-curbing measures must be introduced,
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they should be as minimally intrusive as possible. For example, many
agree that drug tests should be conducted on those, such as school bus
drivers, directly responsible for the lives of others. Some employers, how-
ever, resort to highly intrusive visual surveillance to ensure that the sam-
ple is taken from the person who delivers it. Instead, one can rely on the
much less intrusive procedure of measuring the temperature of the sample
immediately upon delivery.
Fourth, measures that ameliorate the undesirable side effects of neces-
sary privacy-diminishing measures are to be preferred over those that
ignore these effects. Thus, if contact tracing is deemed necessary to fight
the spread of infectious diseases in order to protect public health, efforts
must be made to protect the anonymity of those involved. A third party
may inform those who were in contact with an affected individual about
such exposure and the therapeutic and protective measures they ought to
next undertake without disclosing the identity of the diagnosed person.
Applying these four balancing criteria helps determine which correc-
tions to a society’s course are both necessary and not excessive. This article
focuses on the third criterion and seeks to address the question: what is
least intrusive?

B. Privacy as a Three-Dimensional Cube
In this section I attempt to show that to maintain privacy in the cyber age,
boundaries on information that may be used by the government should
be considered along three major dimensions: the level of sensitivity of the
information, the volume of information collected, and the extent to which
it is cybernated. These considerations guide one to the lowest level of intru-
siveness holding constant the level of common good.

1. Sensitivity

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One dimension is the sensitivity of the information. Information is gen-
erally considered sensitive if, based on the cultural values of the society in