Manage your online identity.

Very interesting article on privacy implications in Knowledge@Wharton. In the article, privacy implications of sharing in social tools are examined. Interesting is the following:

Wharton management professor Stephen J. Kobrin says he is not sure that “Who owns you?” is the right question. “It seems there’s just so much information out there about all of us that it’s all in the public domain. It may not be there legally, but there’s so much in so many places and there are so many ways to aggregate it, that it may not be a reasonable question. The real question is: ‘Is it possible to provide some protection to individuals to prevent everything about them from going to everyone else? And, if it is possible, how can you do it?’”

As our identities are document represented in multiple places and contexts - traditional sources like credit reporting agencies, new sources like blogs and SNS - will we see the advent of legislation controlling how we can use this information? It is an intriguing question.

Consider the following scenario - one in which someone spreads gossip about you to a group of friends, and gossip about you online. In the first case, the gossip will likely impact your life, but it may not have long-lasting implications. In the second case, however, when the gossip is cached and stored in search engines, it has a long-lasting impact that may stay with you forever. It is quite different - and very troublesome.

Susan Freiwald, a former Wharton faculty member who now teaches cyberlaw at the University of San Francisco School of Law, says the legal community has been debating for years whether it is more appropriate to view personal information as a form of property that is “owned” and therefore subject to property protections, or to look at personal information as a privacy right. Over time, the privacy-rights model, not the property model, has emerged as the prism through which courts view rights to personal information.

“The ownership model hasn’t taken off in the law,” says Freiwald. “The basic idea in law is that someone who gathers the information owns it, whether it’s you [who gathers it] or not.” For instance, courts have generally rejected arguments by litigants who have challenged the ability of credit card companies to use personal information on the grounds that the litigants “owned” information about themselves.

In Freiwald’s view, however, privacy law remains largely uncharted waters in affording protection to individuals. “Our legal system does a much better job protecting property interests rather than dignity interests, such as privacy,” she says. “You can draw that conclusion by looking at the penalties we impose on people for stealing intellectual or tangible property versus for violating privacy. The law is not protecting personal privacy very well.” When courts do find privacy violations, she says, the penalties are low.

A very interesting article. You can check it out here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 at 8:49 pm and is filed under Dispatches from a beta, Tips and Tricks, claimID.