Page 47 - Privacy in a Cyber Age Policy and Practice

32 PRIVACY IN A CYBER AGE

opinion and issued her own concurring opinion, in which she articulated
that even short-term GPS monitoring impinges on privacy rights because
it “reflects a wealth of detail about . . . familial, political, professional, reli-
67
gious, and sexual associations.” The courts also have limited government
powers to obtain information on individuals’ book purchasing histories
beginning with United States v. Rumely, famously in the case of In re Grand
Jury Subpoena to Kramerbooks & Afterwords, Inc., in which the govern-
ment unsuccessfully attempted to subpoena Monica Lewinksy’s purchase
records. 68
There is a need for Congress to review these myriad laws and more sys-
tematically and consistently categorize the types of personal information
that should be better protected than others. However, for the purpose of
a first approximation, there is little question that sensitivity can be opera-
tionalized, and there is an extensive categorization of the sensitive types of
most personal information from this viewpoint.

iii. Cybernation
Cybernation is the most novel component of the CAPD. Sensitivity was a
full-blown factor in the paper age; volume was also an issue in the paper
age, although it was of much less pressing importance due to practical limi-
tations. However, the kinds of processing and secondary usages of personal
information engendered by cybernation, as well as their effects on privacy,
were inconceivable in the paper age. Cybernation is also the most conse-
quential factor of the three dimensions because it is the one directly tied
to the grand shift from focusing on primary collection to prevent privacy
violations to focusing on the privacy violations caused by secondary uses.
Cybernation includes storing, “collating,” analyzing, and distributing items
of information.
Privacy is much better protected if the information collected is not
stored. If a tollbooth payment system immediately erases the information
that a given car was at the booth at a certain point in time once the com-
puter has verified payment of the toll, the risk that the information will be
abused to violate privacy is very limited compared to a situation in which
the same information is stored. The same is true for speed cameras that
erase the car’s identifying information once it has been established that it
traveled below the speed limit. (Although CCTV maintains information
somewhat longer, and what they collect has greater bandwidth, they too
could neither store nor share the information and in fact should erase it
after short periods of time.)
By contrast, all data banks, which keep records about even a single par-
ticular personal item—what magazine the person reads, which bar the per-
son frequents—pose a higher risk to privacy than nonstoring mechanisms.