Member-only story
I’m going to try a new style of publishing. I’ve spent many years either writing or making presentations. I’m going to try using Medium to do both. The series that follows will have a presentation as the image, and a shortish description of the argument as text. Let’s see if that helps spread understanding.
For many years now, I’ve been convinced that we’ve been thinking about the privacy problem in the wrong way. This talk is my first effort at framing the alternatives.
The contrast I want to draw is between techniques that protect privacy by empowering users to control access to their data versus techniques that regulate uses, leaving to users a much narrower range of possible or necessary choice.
I’ve been attracted to this contrast ever since Jon Zittrain noted the parallel between debates about copyright and debates about privacy. The implication of his argument was that maybe we should approach the privacy problem in the way we copyright activists were critiquing copyright: Namely, just as we were arguing that copyright law should worry less about regulating “copies” and more about regulating uses, so too might we think about protecting privacy by thinking less about controlling “data” and more about controlling the use of this data.
Once I saw this parallel, I realized the inconsistency in my positions in, for example, Code and Code v2: In both, I argued for regulating uses in the context of copyright, but in both I argued for a very strong property right for privacy. I’m now convinced it has to be one or the other, and I am strongly convinced it should be uses rather than copies/data.
This alternative is not necessarily simpler or obvious. But I do believe it would be more protective of the kind of privacy we should be worrying to protect, while more supportive of open data in those contexts where data could do good.
Anyway, there is lots unexplained and unresolved in this already too long (41 minute) presentation. But I’m hopeful it might begin a useful conversation.
