This book was surprisingly relevant for a book published in 2007 -- perhaps more fresh now than it would have seemed a couple years ago, given the conversations that are being had around harassment and bullying. That said, I would have given it another star if it weren't for the fact that all of the examples are quite dated (note that the author does have newer books). That said, many of the concerns read as fresh. The lasting nature of information on the internet and the way that it can spread so quickly can wreak havoc on the reputation and well being of individuals. But the internet has at its core principles of free speech. Solove argues that while free speech is absolutely fundamental to individual liberty and autonomy and to a well functioning society, we have to balance that freedom against protections of privacy, confidentiality, and reputation. Those values protect much of the same liberty and autonomy that freedom of speech serves to protect.

The key question is how. How do we balance these two values that often serve the same end but can also conflict? Solove has some ideas, but for the most part what this book does is explore the questions rather than prescribe the answers. One thing that Solove does make clear, however, is that he believes that privacy and reputation can be protected. At first blush, it may seem impossible to keep secrets in a digitally connected world, but that can change as norms change and as laws support those norms. At the very least, we should change from an "anything goes" attitude to at least acknowledging that doing something online doesn't give someone a free pass.

Below I've included altogether too many quotes that I found interesting. Emphasis mine.

pg 31,: Our reputation can be a key dimension of our self, something that affects the very core of our identity. Beyond its internal influence on our self-conception, our reputation affects our ability to engage in basic activities in society. We depend upon others to engage in transactions with us, to employ us, to befriend us, and to listen to us. Without the cooperation of others in society, we are often unable to do what we want to do. Without the respect of others, our actions and accomplishments can lose their purpose and meaning. Without the appropriate reputation, our speech, though free, may fall on deaf ears. Our freedom, in short, depends in part upon how others in society judge us.

pg 33: There's a paradox at the heart of reputation -- despite the fact we talk about reputation as earned and the product of our behavior and character, it is something given to us by others in the community. Reputation is a core component of our identity -- it reflects who we are and shapes how we interact with others -- yet it is not solely our own creation. As one person in the nineteenth century put it: "A man's character is what is is; a man's reputation is what other people may imagine him to be."

pg 35: They key question is how much control we ought to have over the spread of information about us. We don't want to provide too much control, as this will allow people to trick us into trusting them when they don't deserve it. Too much control will also stifle free speech, as it will prevent others from speaking about us. Hence the conflict: we want information to flow openly, for this is essential to a free society, yet we also want to have some control over the information that circulates about us, for this is essential to our freedom as well.

pg 37: In the past, rumors and falsehoods would readily spread around the small village, but the Internet lacks the village's corrective of familiarity. In the small village, people had a long history together and knew the whole story about an individual. But now someone reading an online report about some faraway stranger rarely knows the whole story -- the reader has only fragments of information, and when little is invested in a personal relationship, even information that is incomplete and of dubious veracity might be enough to precipitate ridicule, shunning, and reproach.

pg 67-68: The law professor Jeffrey Rosen astutely points out that people have short attention spans and will probably not judge other people fairly: "When intimate personal information circulates among a small group of people who know us well, its significance can be weighed against other aspects of our personality and character. By contrast, when intimate information is removed from its original context and revealed to strangers, we are vulnerable to being misjudged on the basis of our most embarrassing, and therefore most memorable, tastes and preferences."

pg 69: Neither the public nor private self represents the "true" self. We're too complex for that. Our public and private sides are just dimensions in a complex, multifaceted personality, one that is shaped by the roles we play. We express different aspects of our personalities in different relationships and contexts. The psychiatry professor Arnold Ludwig debunks the myth that the self displayed in private is more genuine than the self exhibited in public: "Each self is as real to the person experiencing it and as much the product of natural forces as the other. All that the distinction between a true and false self signifies is a value judgment." As a result, uncovering secrets will not necessarily reveal who people "truly" are or enable more accurate assessments of their character. Instead, these disclosures can often be jarring, for they display people out of the context in which others may know them.

Revealing private facts when first getting to know a person can be even more distorting. According to Goffman, people need time to establish relationships before revealing secrets. Immediate honesty can be costly. When we first meet somebody, we have little invested in that person. We haven't built any bonds of friendship or developed any feelings for that person. So if we learn about a piece of that person's private life that seems bizarre or unpleasant, it's easy to just walk away. But we don't just walk away from people we know well. With time to gain familiarity with a person, we're better able to process information, see the whole person, and weigh secrets in context.

pg 69-70: Nagel's observation suggests a key point -- society recognizes and accepts the fact that the public self is a partly fictional concept. The public self is constructed according to social norms about what is appropriate to expose in public. People may even feel uncomfortable when other people reveal "too much information" about themselves. In short, society expects the public self to be more buttoned-up than the private self.

pg 71: Privacy gives people space to be free from the scrutiny of society. The sociologist Alan Westin observes that privacy protects "minor non-compliance with social norms." Many norms are routinely broken, and privacy often means that we allow people to violate social norms without getting caught or punished for it, without having their peccadillos ascribed to their reputations. The sociologist Amitai Etzioni views privacy as a "realm" where people "can legitimately act without disclosure and accountability to others."

pg 73: Protection against disclosure permits room to change, to define oneself and one's future without becoming a "prisoner of [one's] recorded past." Society has a tendency to tie people too tightly to the past and to typecast people in particular roles. The human personality is dynamic, yet accepting the complete implications of this fact can be difficult.

pg 74: The Internet is transforming the nature and effects of gossip. It is making gossip more permanent and widespread, but less discriminating in the appropriateness of audience. ... Audience matters. .... Another consideration is the purpose of the disclosure. Disclosures made for spite, or to shame others, or simply to entertain, should not be treated the same as disclosures made to educate or inform. When we determine whether gossip is good or not, we must look at the who, what, and why of it. We should ask: Who is making the disclosure? Is the disclosure made to the appropriate audience? Is the purpose behind the disclosure one we should encourage or discourage? The problem with Internet gossip is that it can so readily be untethered from its context.

pg 84: To understand shaming, it is essential to understand norms. Every society has an elaborate lattice of norms. A norm is a rule of conduct, one less official than a law, but sometimes as improper to transgress If you break a law, you can be punished by the government or be sued by another person. Norms generally are not enforced in this manner. Nor are they written down in a book of legal code. Nonetheless, norms are widely known and widely observed rules of social conduct.

pg 94: One of the chief drawbacks of Internet shaming is the permanence of its effects. Internet shaming creates an indelible blemish on a person's identity. Being shamed in cyberspace is akin to being marked for life.

pg 94-95: For the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, shame is more than simply an expression of displeasure at particular acts; rather, it is an enduring reduction in social status to a lesser kind of person: "Shame punishments, historically, are ways of marking a person, often for life, with a degraded identity.... Guilt punishments make the statement, 'You committed a bad act.' Shame punishments make the statement, 'You are a defective type of person.'"

pg 98-99: Although Internet shaming can help enforce norms, norms can often take care of themselves without the help of external enforcement. The law professor Robert Cooter observes that norms often work through a process called "internalization" -- people follow norms not because they fear external shaming by others but because they would feel ashamed of themselves if they violated a norm. ... Of course, for some norms, we may desire the added benefit of external norm enforcement, but for many norms internal self-enforcement works quite nicely on its own. As the law professor Lawrence Mitchell puts it, people "not only want to avoid blame, but blameworthiness." Even if we're never caught, we can never escape from ourselves, and our internal judges are often our most stringent.

pg 102: The shamer's explanation for attacking another person, somebody he probably didn't even know, stems from a belief that shame is necessary to ensure social order. Without the threat of shame, people would transgress norms, making society less orderly and civil. But as some of these incidents demonstrate, although shaming is done to further social order, it paradoxically can have the opposite result. Instead of enhancing social control and order, Internet shaming often careens out of control. It targets people without careful consideration of all the facts and punishes them for their supposed infractions without proportionality. Shaming becomes uncivil, moblike, and potentially subversive of the very social order that it tries to protect.

pg 105: New technologies rarely give rise to questions we have never addressed before. More often they make the old questions more complex.

pg 123: At its best, the law can achieve control without having to be invoked. This might sound paradoxical, but it is a rather obvious point. The best laws for addressing harms are ones that not only help fix the damage but also keep the harms from occurring in the first place. The most effective law rarely needs to be used, as the legal process is expensive and time-consuming. The law works best when it helps people resolve disputes outside the courtroom.

pg 126: In other words, the First Amendment protects false speech not for its own sake but as a means of protecting true speech.

pg 130: One of the most frequently articulated rationales for why we protect free speech is that it promotes individual autonomy. We want people to have the freedom to express themselves in all their uniqueness, eccentricity, and candor. ... But the autonomy justification cuts both ways. As the law professor Sean Scott observes, "The right to privacy and the First Amendment both serve the same interest in individual autonomy." The disclosure of personal information can severely inhibit a person's autonomy and self-development. ... Privacy allows people to be free from worrying about what everybody else will think, and this is liberating and important for free choice. ... Protecting privacy can promote people's autonomy as much as free speech can.

pg 140: Anonymity allows people to be more experimental and eccentric without risking damage to their reputations. Anonymity can be essential to the presentation of ideas, for it can strip away reader biases and prejudices and add mystique to a text. People might desire to be anonymous because they fear social ostracism or being fire from their jobs. Without anonymity, some people might not be willing to express controversial ideas. Anonymity thus can be critical to preserving people's right to speak freely.

pg 140: When anonymous, people are often much nastier and more uncivil in their speech. It is easier to say harmful things about others when we don't have to take responsibility. When we talk about others, we affect non only their reputation but ours as well. If a person gossips about inappropriate things, betrays confidences, spreads false rumors and lies, then her own reputation is likely to suffer.

pg 141: When people can avoid being identified, they can slip away from their bad reputations. ... If entry and exit are too easy, commitment, trustworthiness, and reciprocity will not develop. In other words, anonymity inhibits the process by which reputations are formed, which can have both good and bad consequences. Not having accountability for our speech can be liberating and allow us to speak more candidly; but it can also allow us to harm other people without being accountable for it.

pg 159-160: Words can wound. They can destroy a person's reputation, and in the process distort that person's very identity. Nevertheless, we staunchly protect expression even when it can cause great damage because free speech is essential to our autonomy and to a democratic society. But protecting privacy and reputation is also necessary for autonomy and democracy. There is no easy solution to how to balance free speech with privacy and reputation. This balance isn't like the typical balance of civil liberties against the need for order and social control. Instead, it is a balance with liberty on both sides of the scale -- freedom to speak and express oneself pitted against freedom to ensure that our reputations aren't destroyed and our privacy isn't invaded.

pg 163: There is a difference between what is captured in the fading memories of only a few people and what is broadcast to a worldwide audience. The law, however, generally holds that once something is exposed to the public, it can no longer be private. Traditionally privacy is viewed in a binary way, dividing the world into two distinct realms, the public and the private. If a person is in a public place, she cannot expect privacy. If information is exposed to the public in any way, it isn't private.

pg 164-165: Today, privacy goes far beyond whether something is exposed to others. What matters most is the nature of the exposure and what is done with the information. There is a difference between casual observation and the more indelible recording of information and images.

pg 165: We often engage in our daily activities in public expecting to be just a face in the crowd, another ant in the colony. We run into hundreds of strangers every day and don't expect them to know who we are or to care about what we do. We don't expect the clerk at the store to take an interest in what we buy. In other words, we're relatively anonymous in a large part of our lives in public. Identification dramatically alters the equation.

pg 165: We realize that there are different social norms for different situations, and broadcasting matters beyond their original context takes away our ability to judge the situation appropriately

pg 166: Thus merely assessing whether information is exposed in public or to others can no longer be adequate to determining whether we should protect it as private. Unless we rethink the binary notion of privacy, new technologies will increasingly invade the enclaves of privacy we enjoy in public. Privacy is a complicated set of norms, expectations, and desires that goes far beyond the simplistic notion that if you're in public, you have no privacy.

pg 170: Privacy can be violated not just by revealing previously concealed secrets, but by increasing the accessibility to information already available. The desire for privacy is thus much more granular than the current binary model recognizes. Privacy involves degrees, not absolutes. It involves establishing control over personal information, not merely keeping it completely secret. As the computer security expert Bruce Scheier argues: "People are willing to share all sorts of information as long as they are in control. ..."

pg 173: Confidentiality differs substantially from secrecy. Secrecy involves hiding information, concealing it from others. Secrecy entails expectations that the skeletons in one's closet will remain shut away in darkness. In contrast, confidentiality involves sharing one's secrets with select others. Confidentiality is an expectation within a relationship. When we tell others intimate information, we expect them to keep it confidential. Sharing personal data with others makes us vulnerable. We must trust others not to betray us by leaking our information.

pg 179: Social network theory often focuses primarily on connections, but networks involve more than nodes and links. There are norms about information sharing that are held within certain groups, such as norms of confidentiality.

pg 184-185: A problem with the binary view of privacy is that it is an all-or-nothing proposition. We often don't want absolute secrecy. Instead, we want to control how our information is used, to whom it is revealed, and how it is spread. We want to limit the flow of information, not stop it completely. Moreover, different people have different entitlements to know information about others. ...

But is control over information really feasible? If we expose information to others, isn't it too difficult for the law to allow us still to control it? Perhaps the law is reticent in granting control because of the practical difficulties. Information spreads rapidly, sometimes like a virus, and it is not easily contained. But in other contexts, the law has developed a robust system of controlling information. For example, copyright law recognizes strong rights of control even though information is public.

pg 193: There is, of course, a limit to how much the law can do. The law is an instrument capable of subtle notes, but it is not quite a violin. Part of the solution depends upon how social norms develop with regard to privacy. The law's function is to lurk in the background, to ensure that people know that they must respect confidentiality or the privacy even of people in public. In the foreground, however, norms will largely determine how privacy shall be protected in the brave new online world.

pg 194: The law is a puny instrument compared to norms. As the law professor Tracey Meares observes, "Social norms are better and more effective constraints on behavior than law could ever be." Although the law can't supplant norms, it can sometimes help to shape them. ( )

Thought it was OK and brought up a lot of interesting issues, but didn't feel like there were many good conclusions or recommendations ( )

http://rivkat.livejournal.com/185604.html ( )