Back in January, Neil Richards had commented on attempts to amend the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), suggesting that allowing “seamless” sharing could be cutting back on important privacy protections that we should not weaken. Neil’s argument didn’t convince me that we shouldn’t allow those who want to share, to share, and I posed some questions to him.
I am pleased to point readers to Neil’s fuller article on this topic, which will be published in the Georgetown Law Journal, “The Perils of Social Reading.” Here’s the abstract:
Our law currently treats records of our reading habits under two contradictory rules – rules mandating confidentiality, and rules permittingdisclosure. Recently, the rise of the social Internet has created more of these records and more pressures on when and how they should be shared. Companies like Facebook, in collaboration with many newspapers, have ushered in the era of “social reading,” in which what we read may be “frictionlessly shared” with our friends and acquaintances. Disclosure and sharing are on the rise.
This Article sounds a cautionary note about social reading and frictionless sharing. Social reading can be good, but the ways in which we set up the defaults for sharing matter a great deal. Our reader records implicate our intellectual privacy – the protection of reading from surveillance and interference so that we can read freely, widely, and without inhibition. I argue that the choices we make about how to share have real consequences, and that “frictionless sharing” is not frictionless, nor it is really sharing. Although sharing is important, the sharing of our reading habits is special. Such sharing should be conscious and only occur after meaningful notice.
The stakes in this debate are immense. We are quite literally rewiring the public and private spheres for a new century. Choices we make now about the boundaries between our individual and social selves, between consumers and companies, between citizens and the state, will have unforeseeable ramifications for the societies our children and grandchildren inherit. We should make choices that preserve our intellectual privacy, not destroy it. This Article suggests practical ways to do just that.
You can download the full article from SSRN.