Page 34 - Privacy in a Cyber Age Policy and Practice

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More Coherent, Less

Subjective, and Operational

n Chapter 1, I outlined a a cyber age privacy doctrine, or a CAPD, that
Iseeks to account for important differences between the paper age and
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the digital one. This chapter attempts to show that the CAPD provides
a coherent normative doctrine that can be employed by the courts and
legislatures and that is more systematic, less subjective, and at least as
operational as the prevailing privacy doctrines. It deals with the right to
privacy vis-à-vis the U.S. government rather than as a protection from
intrusions by private actors such as corporations. Section A summarizes
and develops the previously published doctrine. Section B compares the
coherence and objectivity of the CAPD to those of other doctrines and
indicates the ways the CAPD can be operationalized.

A. The Cyber Age Privacy Doctrine Revisited
The advent of the cyber age—also referred to as the digital revolution—
requires a new privacy doctrine. The main—although not the only—reason
for this requirement is that the proportion of privacy violations that result
from secondary usages of personal information compared to those that
result from primary collection has radically changed. Most privacy viola-
tions in the paper age resulted from primary collection; most violations in
the cyber age result from secondary usages of information that has been
legally collected. If a collection was deemed legal in the paper age, there
were very sharp limits, at least in practice, on the additional uses of the
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information. Thus, the danger that permission would be abused was rela-
tively limited. In the cyber age, functional limits on data abuse are fewer
and secondary usages proliferate.