Customer Reviews

Who Owns Information?: From Privacy To Public Access

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This is a unique book by a very respected scholar. It methodically goes, chapter by chapter, over who owns your name and address (the U.S. Postal Service does), your telephone number, your medical history, your image, your electronic messages, video entertainment, religious information, computer software, and government information. The answers are not always obvious. A real benchmark.

Information privacy is a dynamic field. This is a good introductory book to key concepts. It is also a nice guide to key legal decisions that have influenced current information privacy policy in the United States. The legal cases are presented in an approachable, narrative form -- not a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo. The only shortcoming of this book is that it was published in 1994. A lot has changed since then. Even so, I recommend it as a starting point for those just stepping into the realm of information privacy.

You need to understand that information and knowledge are the key to overcoming or finding the most efficient way to solve a problem. Humanity's infrastructure has created a tremendous amount of infrastructure. It is critical, for the person who would be effective, to take a perspective of where the information may lie and how to best access it.

This book is not the most focused response to approaching this very fundamental problem - it is more a technical study for a subquestion in information science and policy. But it IS something that will begin to steer one in the right direction of developing a perspective of how to map knowledge in society - who owns it, where it is in society, and how to begin accessing it. The necessary skills are that this helps with is in developing a nascent understanding of the economics of information and knowledge sharing.