At 22:29 4/12/2000 -0400, dmolnar wrote:
>I'm also interested in your comment that contract law may be sufficient to
>combat this problem. Garfinkle raises and then dismisses the idea of
>considering personal information as "property", and then developing the
>notion of rights and contract which we have for other property for
>personal information. Who has treated this from the other side, the
>libertarian/anarchist/whatever you want to call it viewpoint? is there
>a good introduction to "contract law and personal data" lying around
>someplace?
Tim has already responded to this idea (it's Garfinkel, BTW), but let me
try to add something. Clearly information about me cannot be "property" in
the sense that my car is. Someone walking down the street can observe
identifiable information about me and communicate it to others. That's
called gossip, or news reporting, or database-adding and it's long served a
socially valuable function.
Restricting it through force of law would rather put a damper on dinner
table conversations, not to mention muzzling journalists -- who traffic in
personal information about someone for their own financial gain. Sure, an
exception can be devised to allow reporting, but in this anyone-can-publish
age, it would likely swallow the rule.
But restricting it through force of contract? That's a different story,
with plenty of precedent. We interact with business associates, doctors,
priests, and counselors every day, and expect our exchanges to be private.
We are used to using contract law and reputation and other non-governmental
authority structures to reinforce our expectation and provide means of
redress in traditional spaces. Now we need to extend this concept.
Tim correctly pointed you to basic sources of information on freedom to
contract, which you should read and digest.
But these also might be useful:
http://www.intellectualcapital.com/issues/issue225/item4270.asp
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-295.html
http://www.law.ucla.edu/faculty/volokh/privacy.htm
I'm copying Simson.
-Declan
