The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age

The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age Daniel J. Solove. New York: New York University Press, 2006. 290 pp. $29.95.Daniel J. Solove, like most contemporary writers on privacy, offers a sky-is-falling perspective on privacy in the modern paperless, transactional age. Due in part to the rise of so-called "digital dossiers" and perhaps, in the opinion of the reviewer, due in part to apathy, Solove observes recent developments as a new paradigm of the privacy problematic. The goal is "to rethink longstanding notions of privacy to grapple with the consequences of living in an information age" (p. 2). Much of what is covered here is not new. As Solove comments in his introduction: "There are hundreds of companies that are constructing gigantic databases of psychological profiles, amassing data about an individual's race, gender, income, hobbies, and purchases" (p. 2). Although the combination of private and public information "has long been viewed as problematic" (p. 6), Solove never adequately explains why or moves beyond the obvious: Marketing, credit, and related research companies have been engaging in such practices for years; in fairness to Solove, perhaps the difference is capacity to collect, to share, to compile, etc. This is the power of "aggregation" which contributes to the inability to assign adequate value to personal information. Though Solove does not make the connection, this may be a key to understanding the power of apathy or more kindly the unawareness that immobilizes individual responses to personal privacy protection. What is new is that "beyond articulating a new understanding of contemporary privacy problems" Solove attempts "to demonstrate the ways that the problems can be solved" (p. 6). After observing traditional conceptualizations such as big brother (Orwellian, pp. 29-35), secrecy and invasion (though he uses the idea of invasion to describe both), Solove claims to use a new Kafkaesque metaphor of irresponsible bureaucracy (pp. 36-41).On the way to this metaphor, Chapter 2 recounts the rise of public and private sector databases and the new uses of the web as a point and source of data collection. Chapter 3 reviews various metaphors and views the ultimate harm as one affecting human dignity through misjudgments, diminished capacity to participate, and unfairness (perhaps unevenness is more descriptive) in the collection of information. Chapter 4 reviews the inadequacy of the private (traditional tort and more recent statutory sector by sector approaches) and public law of privacy in the United States. …