Customer Reviews

Understanding Privacy

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It can often seem that we have no secrets--students trumpet their relationship status and crushes on Facebook, data brokers sell our Social Security numbers for a small fee, grocery stores know our eating habits and can guess to the dime what we will appear in our carts at check out every Sunday. So why bother caring about privacy if we really do not have any and cannot control it anyway?

In a beautifully rendered and important book, Professor Solove helps answer that question (and many others) and, in the process, deepens our appreciation of how much privacy is really at stake and why it matters.

Understanding Privacy carefully lays out the different ways our privacy is compromised and the harm that can result. The book brings alive the fact that when our privacy is threatened, individuals are not alone in suffering harm. To be sure, a person whose privacy is compromised experiences problems, from identity theft when a Social Security number is released to a thief to lost job opportunities when drug testing results taken for sports programs make their way to future employers. But, as this book so ably demonstrates, society as a whole suffers as well.

Understanding Privacy illuminates the kaleidoscopic interests at stake and offers a principled way for us to face them. As technology marches on, our privacy is increasingly compromised. Telephone companies store our incoming and outgoing calls, search engines know what we are interested in, and the government mines our information. But, as this book makes clear, businesses, government, and people are in charge of those technologies and have important decisions to make about the information that they amass, use, and disclose, and the activities that they watch. This book is a must read for anyone who wants to appreciate the philosophical and practical questions at issue in our information age.

Daniel Solove's book -- and his approach to classifying and dealing with privacy problems -- will have a profound impact on all future privacy debates. In that sense, it is a vital text; a must read for all who follow, or engage in, privacy debates.

On the other hand, Solove's claim that he can construct a new paradigm based strictly on a pragmatic, utilitarian, "problem-solving" approach, is ultimately a failure. There is just no getting around the fact that, at some point, you are going to have to provide a more robust theory of rights or justice to explain why one right trumps another. He fails to do so in this book.

Read my complete review here:

http://techliberation.com/2008/11/08/book-review-soloves-understanding-privacy

I picked up this book because I was working on a college report dealing with privacy. I love this book--it has deepened my understanding of privacy. Solove presents a taxonomy of privacy harms, listing four major and about 16-20 minor categories of privacy harm, covering a wide range of topics and examples as well as legal precedents and cultural differences. I have not seen so complete an exploration of privacy, although I still don't think this book alone will give a full understanding of privacy. Solove doesn't directly address data permanence or long-term storage as a harm (though it might obliquely fall under his "data processing" category). A student of privacy probably ought to understand various forms of privacy protection as well, such as Safe Harbor (though it was not intended as a model, it is still instructive).

I believe this book is a must-read for any student of privacy. If you don't want to buy this book yet, I recommend finding a copy of his paper "'I've Got Nothing to Hide', and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy". That paper outlines his taxonomy, and does a very good job of defending privacy in the digital age. You might be able to find the paper online for free.