Page 32 - Privacy in a Cyber Age Policy and Practice

A CYBER AGE PRIVACY DOCTRINE 17

no legal requirements to erase these tapes. However, such laws should be
considered. (Europeans are increasingly recognizing a “right to be forgot-
ten.”) It would be in the public interest to require that footage be kept for
a fixed period of time, as it has proven useful in fighting crime and terror-
ism, but also to ban under most circumstances the integration of the video
feed into encompassing and cybernated systems of the kind Microsoft has
developed.
The treatment of private local CCTVs should be examined in the con-
text of the ways other such spot collection information is treated. Because
the bandwidth of information collected by toll booths, speed cameras and
radiation detectors is very narrow, one might be permitted to store it longer
and feed it into cybernated systems. By contrast, cell phone tracking can
be utilized to collect a great volume and bandwidth of information about
a person’s location and activities. People carry their phones to many places
they cannot take their cars, where no video cameras or radiation detectors
will be found, including sensitive places such as political meetings, houses
of worship, and residences. (These rules must be constantly updated as
what various technologies can observe and retain constantly changes.)
Regulations to keep information paper bound have been introduced for
reasons other than protecting privacy, but these requirements still have the
effect of limiting intrusiveness. For example, Congress prevents the Bureau
of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) from computeriz-
ing gun records when such information is collected during background
58
checks. In 2013, an amendment to the anti-insider trading STOCK Act
exempted 28,000 executive branch staff from having to post their finan-
cial disclosure forms “online in a searchable, sortable and downloadable
59
format.” These bans remind one that not all the privacy measures that
are in place are legitimate and that some are best scaled back rather than
enhanced. 60
A related issue is raised by the cybernation of arrest records. Arrest
records should be but are not considered highly sensitive information.
When these records, especially those concerning people who were subse-
quently released without any charges, were paper bound, the damage they
inflicted on most people’s reputations was limited. However, as a result of
cybernation, they have become much more problematic. Under the sug-
gested doctrine, arrest records of people not charged after a given period
of time would be available only to law enforcement officers. The opposite
might be said about data banks that alert the public to physicians that have
been denied privileges for cause, a very high threshold that indicates seri-
ous ethical shortcomings.
Many computer systems (“clouds” included) encrypt their data and a
few have introduced audit trails. The cyber age privacy doctrine might