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University of California Press

Taking Privacy Seriously

How to Create the Rights We Need While We Still Have Something to Protect

by James B. Rule (Author)
Price: $85.00 / £71.00
Publication Date: Apr 2024
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 328
ISBN: 9780520382626
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 1 b/w illustration, 2 tables

About the Book

Other books remind us of what we already know—that privacy is under great pressure. James Rule provides a step-by-step plan to create a significantly more private and authentically democratic world.
 
Taking Privacy Seriously offers both a concise, hard-hitting assessment of the origins of today’s privacy-eroding practices and a roadmap for creating robust new individual rights over our personal data. Rule proposes eleven key reforms in the control and use of personal information, all aimed at redressing the balance of power between ordinary citizens and data-hungry corporate and government institutions.
 
What a privacy-deprived America needs most is not less technology, Rule argues, but profound political realignment. His eleven proposed reforms range from launching a major public-works investment consisting of a series of websites publicly documenting the personal data uses of nearly all government and private institutions; to instating a right for any citizen to withdraw from any personal data system not required by law; to creating a universal property right over commercial exploitation of data on oneself—so that no company or other organization could profit from use or sale of such data without permission. Succinct and compelling, Taking Privacy Seriously explains how we can refashion information technologies so that they serve human needs, not the other way around.

About the Author

James B. Rule has been writing about struggles over the control of personal information since his first book, Private Lives and Public Surveillance.

Table of Contents

Contents

Preface 
Acknowledgments 

Introduction: Careering Down a Road Hardly Anyone Wants to Take 

1 Don’t Blame Technology 
2 Ban Personal-Decision Systems That Violate Core Values 
3 Require Consent for Disclosure 
4 Make Personal-Data Use Minimal, Transparent, and Trackable 
5 Institute a Right to Resign from Personal-Decision Systems 
6 Create a Universal Property Right over Commercialization of Data on Oneself 
7 Conclusions 
8 The Future 

Appendix 1: The Eleven Reforms 
Appendix 2: International Privacy Affirmations vs. Privacy Setbacks, 1983–2019 
Index 
 

Reviews

"Taking Privacy Seriously examines the origins of today’s privacy-eroding practices. The 11 key reforms he outlines are intended to help redress the balance of power between ordinary citizens and data-hungry corporate and government institutions."
 
The Berkeleyside
"This book is direct, impatient (in the best way possible), and urgent. It doesn’t waste time summarizing all the things we already know about privacy in the United States, but instead asks, What is to be done? We need a book like this."—David Murakami Wood, Professor, Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa