The Evolution of Privacy Rights and Information Technology

14 May 2007
6.033

Daniel J. Weitzner
Decentralized Information Group
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

These slides: http://dig.csail.mit.edu/2007/Talks/0514-6033/

Overview

1. What is privacy?
2. How does technology change privacy rights?
3. New directions in Web privacy

Privacy's Boundaries - The Home

"The house of everyone is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defence against injury and violence, as for his repose...." Semayne's Case, All ER Rep 62 (Michaelmas Tern 1604)

Privacy's Boundaries - The Home Breached

"Ways may some day be developed by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home.... Can it be that the Constitution affords no protection against such invasions of individual security?" Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 467 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting)

Historical Evolution of Surveillance Technology and Legal Regulation

Expansion of Technological Capabilities & 4th Amendment Protection

	Communications Technology	Crime	4A trigger	4A protection
1928	Early telephone	Prohibition	Castle: Physical -- property/trespass (Olmstead)	none b/c no trespass

Privacy's Boundaries - New Privacy Protections

"The Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection.... But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected Katz v. United States. 389 U.S. 347 (1967)

Historical Evolution of Surveillance Technology and Legal Regulation

Expansion of Technological Capabilities & 4th Amendment Protection

	Communications Technology	Crime	4A trigger	4A protection
1928	Early telephone	Prohibition	Castle: Physical -- property/trespass (Olmstead)	none b/c no trespass
1968	Mass market phones	Gambling/Organized Crime	People not places (Katz)	Congress enacts guidance of Katz: Probable cause, limited class of crimes, after the fact inventory

Privacy's Boundaries - New Challenges

It would be foolish to contend that the degree of privacy secured to citizens by the Fourth Amendment has been entirely unaffected by the advance of technology...." Kyllo v. United States. 533 U.S. 27 (2001) (Scalia, J.)

Historical Evolution of Surveillance Technology and Legal Regulation

Expansion of Technological Capabilities & 4th Amendment Protection

	Communications Technology	Crime	4A trigger	4A protection
1928	Early telephone	Prohibition	Castle: Physical -- property/trespass (Olmstead)	none b/c no trespass
1968	Mass market phones	Gambling/Organized Crime	People not places (Katz)	Congress enacts guidance of Katz: Probable cause, limited class of crimes, after the fact inventory
1984/6	Store & forward/email	[pre-emptive strike by technophiles]	Activity not medium	ECPA: email gets status of 1st class mail vs. 3rd party business records
1994	Transactional records	Global, digital communications	Power to reveal personal information vs. owner	judicial supervision for transactional records access
2007 Today	World Wide Web and data mining	Terrorism	People not information	??

What Privacy Isn't

Saltzer and Schroeder (The Protection of Information in Computer Systems):

“The term “privacy” denotes a socially defined ability of an individual (or organization) to determine whether, when, and to whom personal (or organizational) information is to be released.”

Toward Another Approach...

1. How many believe you are subject to law (any law)?
2. How many of you follow (most) laws? [exclude speed limits]
3. How many of you read all the laws to which you believe you are subject?
4. How many have been to a court of law?

Information Accountability Through Policy Aware Systems

General view (amongst the 'digerati'): law has to catch up with new technology.

General question: how will laws catch up?

My question: How will the Web finally catch up with the 'real world'?: in everyday life, the vast major of 'policy' problems get worked out without recourse to legal system.

Design goal: instrument the Web to provide seamless social interactions which allow us to avoid legal system the way we do in the rest of life

Global perspective: In the shift from centralized to decentralized information systems we see a general trend:

ex ante policy enforcement barriers -> policy description with late binding of rules for accountability

Research Opportunities and More Information

For more information see:

• 6.805
• MIT Decentralized Information Group: http://dig.csail.mit.edu/
• Transparent, Accountable Datamining Initiative (TAMI): http://groups.csail.mit.edu/dig/TAMI
• Policy Aware Web project (PAW): http://www.policyawareweb.org/
• Feigenbaum and Weitzner (eds.), "Report on the 2006 TAMI/Portia Workshop on Privacy and Accountability."
• Weitzner, Abelson, Berners-Lee, Hanson, Hendler, Kagal, McGuinness, Sussman, Waterman, Transparent Accountable Data Mining: New Strategies for Privacy Protection,; MIT CSAIL Technical Report MIT-CSAIL-TR-2006-007 [DSpace handle] (27 January 2006).

Work described here is supported by the US National Science Foundation Cybertrust Program (05-518) and ITR Program (04-012).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.