These are among the most pressing challenges to privacy in a world riddled with large sets of data representing individuals’ actions, transactions, interactions, physiology, beliefs, states and expressions, all algorithmically processed as grounds for making decisions about persons.ĭespite their inability to speak to or remedy these emerging privacy problems, the legal regimes and professional practices that embed fair information practice principles have proved amazingly resilient.
Such privacy harms stem from information, yet they are not addressed by strategies centred on individual control over information. Privacy harms may arise for which individual control offers no protection or remedy, for example, when actions are taken based on group classifications, or new and unexpected insights are inferred from data that individuals have intentionally disclosed, or an individual’s sensitive personal information is derived through analysing data revealed by others in their social network, their behaviour on social media or by cross-referencing sets of ‘de-identified’ data in which they are included.
Informational self-determination can hardly be considered a sufficient objective, nor individual control a sufficient mechanism, for protecting privacy in the face of this new class of technologies and attendant threats. However, these principles have proved less useful with the rise of data analytics and machine learning. They have been leveraged to protect the individual’s right to informational self-determination in multiple spheres of economic life, and to address risks emerging from the introduction of technologies ranging from electronic health records to radio-frequency identification tags. The principles have proved admirably suited to advance specific conceptions of privacy through tumultuous technical advances. Īfter years of consultation and debate, fuelled by the entrepreneurial activity of a growing community of privacy professionals, these principles now form the basis of numerous countries’ personal data or information privacy laws, as well as the organizing framework for much institutional and professional work across the public and private sectors. A shared set of fair information practice principles-reflecting a commitment to protecting informational self-determination-emerged on both sides of the Atlantic. Experts and policy-makers convened to explore the risks and develop protections for privacy. The growing use of mainframe computers by States and large corporations, coupled with controversies around State use of personal data to take often covert, illicit actions against citizens, drove policy-makers to grapple with the implications of this heady mix of data and computation. The 1970s were a watershed period for privacy.