Abstract
Until now, privacy protections have focused on guaranteeing individuals a measure of control over information relating to themselves. However, in the digital age, this protection has become less effective since data is constantly collected and stored in ways that make it difficult for the individual to have control over each piece of information. Furthermore, the information communicated by an individual, when processed in conjunction with other data points, may allow potentially harmful inferences to be drawn about other individuals and the groups to which they may belong. The potential of Big Data to harm groups, particularly in fragile contexts or areas of weak statehood, therefore raises a number of questions which this chapter seeks to explore: is there such a thing as group privacy, distinct from individual privacy? Is group privacy a workable concept? If so, should it be a legally enforceable right and how can it be protected? We begin by exploring various concepts of privacy and group; then discuss how to affirm and protect group privacy through a combination of traditional levers of power and better data management, security, and literacy.
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Notes
- 1.
We use the notion of group in the ordinary meaning of the term. It must be noted that related notions exist in specific disciplines. Logic, linguistics, and computer programming all refer to the type-token relationship to distinguish between a class or concept (the type) and the objects that instantiate it (the tokens). Similarly, mathematics refers to the set-element relationship; in this framework, it is possible for a set to have only one element, in which case the set is called a singleton. We use the notions of group and members, or group and individuals, in order to connote the cross-disciplinary nature and human focus of our inquiry, and to enable us to formulate recommendations with a policy-making and legal reach. In the ordinary meaning of these terms, a group is usually made up of more than one member, and we will focus on these situations.
- 2.
See, e.g. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Art. 26.
- 3.
Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, Arts. 1A, 33.
- 4.
Art. 23.1.
- 5.
Art. II.
- 6.
E.g., ICCPR, Art. 1.
- 7.
For instance, article 27 of the ICCPR prohibits states with ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities from denying members of these minorities the right, “in community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practise their own religion, or to use their own language” (emphasis added).
- 8.
E.g. International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Art. 8.1(b)–(c).
- 9.
Principles 8, 22(g).
- 10.
See generally Friedrich Rosenfeld, “Collective reparation for victims of armed conflict,” 92 International Review of the Red Cross 731 (2010).
- 11.
See, e.g., Bowker and Star’s work on the devastating impact of classifying humans by race under South Africa’s Apartheid regime. Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Star, Sorting Things Out, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1999.
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
See UN Resolution A/HRC/RES/28/16, to be found here: http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?si=A/HRC/RES/28/16.
- 15.
Solove 2008.
- 16.
Daniel Solove, “Conceptualizing Privacy”, 90 California Law Review 1087, 2002, at 1089–1089.
- 17.
Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, « The Right to Privacy », Harvard Law Review, Volume IV, No 5, December 1890.. See also Solove 2008; vom Lehn 2014.
- 18.
Daniel Solove, “Conceptualizing Privacy”, 90 California Law Review 1087, 2002, at 1094.
- 19.
James Q. Whitman, “Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity Versus Liberty,” 113 Yale Law Journal 1153, 2004. See also Bloustein 1964.
- 20.
‘Anonymity and Reason’, Privacy in the Modern Age [ed. Rotenberg, Horwitz and Scott, The New Press, 2015].
- 21.
Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, « The Right to Privacy », Harvard Law Review, Volume IV, No 5, December 1890.
- 22.
Yael Onn et al. 2012.
- 23.
See Privacy International, “Lebanon: It’s Time to You’re your International Position on Privacy Into Action at the National Level,” 2016. https://www.privacyinternational.org/node/586
- 24.
Akinsuyi, F. Franklin. “Data Protection and Privacy Laws Nigeria, a Trillion Dollar Opportunity!!” Social Science Research Network. April 24, 2015. http://ssrn.com/abstract=2598603
- 25.
Solove 2008; Smith, Dinev and Xu 2011; Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier 2013.
- 26.
Westin 1968.
- 27.
See also Paul Ohm, “Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization”, UCLE Law Review, Vol 57, p. 1701, 2010.
- 28.
de Montjoye, Yves-Alexandre, Samuel S. Wang and Alex Pentland, “On the Trusted Use of Large-Scale Personal Data,” IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, 35–4 (2012).
- 29.
Whong, Chris “Foiling NYC’S Taxi Trip Data” Chriswhong.Com. (2016) http://chriswhong.com/open-data/foil_nyc_taxi/
- 30.
“Riding With the Stars: Passenger Privacy in the NYC Taxicab Dataset.” Neustar Research, September 15, 2014. http://research.neustar.biz/2014/09/15/riding-with-the-stars-passenger-privacy-in-the-nyc-taxicab-dataset/
- 31.
Berlee, Anna. “Using NYC Taxi Data to Identify Muslim Taxi Drivers.” The Interdisciplinary Internet Institute. January 21, 2015. http://www.theiii.org/index.php/997/using-nyc-taxi-data-to-identify-muslim-taxi-drivers/
- 32.
Raymond, Nathaniel. “Beyond ‘Do No Harm’ and Individual Consent: Reckoning with the Emerging Ethical Challenges of Civil Society’s Use of Data.” (forthcoming)
- 33.
Bengtsson, Linus, et al. “Improved response to disasters and outbreaks by tracking population movements with mobile phone network data: a post-earthquake geospatial study in Haiti.” PLoS Med 8.8 (2011): e1001083.
- 34.
“Using Cell Phone Data to Curb the Spread of Malaria.” Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health News. October 11, 2012. http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/cell-phone-data-malaria/
- 35.
Tatem, Andrew J., et al. “Integrating rapid risk mapping and mobile phone call record data for strategic malaria elimination planning.” Malaria journal13.1 (2014): 1–16.
- 36.
Blumenstock, Joshua, et al. “Neighborhood and Network Segregation: Ethnic Homophily in a Silently Separate Society.” Proc. NetMob (2015).
- 37.
See Decuyper, Adeline, et al. “Estimating food consumption and poverty indices with mobile phone data.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.2595 (2014); Smith, Christopher, Afra Mashhadi, and Licia Capra. “Ubiquitous sensing for mapping poverty in developing countries.” Paper submitted to the Orange D4D Challenge (2013); Mao, Huina, et al. “Mobile communications reveal the regional economy in Côte d’Ivoire.” Proc. of NetMob (2013).
- 38.
Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/ALL/?uri=CELEX:31995L0046
- 39.
- 40.
Van Den Hoven, Jeroen. Information technology, privacy and the protection of personal data. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
- 41.
Nissenbaum, Helen. “Privacy as contextual integrity.” Wash. L. Rev. 79 (2004): 119.
- 42.
For the analogy of information as product, see also Posner, Richard A. “The economics of privacy.” The American economic review 71, no. 2 (1981): 405–409.
- 43.
Directive 95/46/EC, supra note 31, article 8.
- 44.
Antonio Cassese, Self-Determination of Peoples : A Legal Reappraisal, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 11.
- 45.
Jonathan I. Charney, Self-Determination : Chechnya, Kosovo, and East Timor, Vanderilt Journal of Transnational Law, volume 34, p. 455.
- 46.
Id.
- 47.
G.A. Resolution 1803, U.N. GAOR, 17th session, Supp. No. 17, at 15, U.N. Doc A/5217 (1962).
- 48.
George Whitecross Paton, A Textbook of Jurisprudence 393 (G. W. Paton & David P. Derhamd eds., 4th ed., 1972), cited in Black’s Law Dictionary, 9th edition, 2009.
- 49.
See Sprenger, Polly. “Sun on Privacy : ‘Get Over It.’” Wired, January 26, 1999. http://archive.wired.com/politics/law/news/1999/01/17538; Preston, Alex. “The Death of Privacy.” The Guardian, August 3, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/03/internet-death-privacy-google-facebook-alex-preston
- 50.
Singer, Natasha, 2016. “Why A Push For Online Privacy Is Bogged Down In Washington”. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/29/technology/obamas-effort-on-consumer-privacy-falls-short-critics-say.html?_r=0.
- 51.
See Omer Tene and Jules Polonetsky, Big Data for All: Privacy and User Control in the Age of Analytics, 11 Nw. J. Tech. & Intell. Prop. 239 (2013). http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/njtip/vol11/iss5/1, pp. 260–263. See also Ohm, “Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization”, UCLE Law Review, Vol 57, p. 1763, 2010.
- 52.
On the predictive nature of Big Data analysis, see Kate Crawford and Jason Schultz, Big Data and Due Process: Toward a Framework to Redress Predictive Privacy Harms, 55 B.C.L. Rev. 93 (2014), http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/bclr/vol55/iss1/4 and Ian Kerr and Jessica Earle, “Prediction, Preemption, Presumption: How Big Data Threatens Big Picture Privacy”, 66 Stan. L. Rev. Online 65, 2013, http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/privacy-and-big-data/prediction-preemption-presumption.
- 53.
While privacy and data protection laws are generally strong in developed countries, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development underlines that it remains “inadequate” in other parts of the world. UNCTAD, Information Economy Report, 24 March 2015, http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/ier2015_en.pdf, pp. 64–65. E.g., at the moment only 14 African 14 countries have or are planning to enact privacy regulations. However, the African Union recently developed a convention on cyber security and personal data protection that would commit member states to establish legal frameworks for e-transactions, protection of data, and punishment of violations. http://www.internetsociety.org/sites/default/files/Internet%20development%20and%20Internet%20governance%20in%20Africa.pdf
- 54.
The right to privacy in the digital age, 30 June 2014, Report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Session27/Documents/A.HRC.27.37_en.pdf
- 55.
- 56.
The regulation of algorithms has already been applied successfully in other areas, such as in the gambling industry.
- 57.
- 58.
- 59.
Daniel Greenwood, Arkadiusz Stopczynski, Brian Sweatt, Thomas Hardjono, and Alex Pentland, “Institutional Controls : the New Deal on Data”
- 60.
See Google and the right to be forgotten: Silver, Joe. 2014. “Google Must Erase “Inadequate” Links, Court Says”. Ars Technica. Accessed April 1 2016. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/google-must-erase-inadequate-links-court-says/.
- 61.
Daniel Greenwood, Arkadiusz Stopczynski, Brian Sweatt, Thomas Hardjono, and Alex Pentland, “Institutional Controls : the New Deal on Data”
- 62.
On the difficulties of “privacy self-management” in the current situation, see Daniel J. Solove, “Privacy Self-Management and the Consent Dilemma”, 126 Harvard Law Review 1880 (2013), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2171018.
- 63.
Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, Samuel S. Wang, Alex Pentland, “On the Trusted Use of Large-Scale Personal Data”, 2012.
- 64.
Palantir Gotham Overview, https://www.palantir.com/palantir-gotham/.
- 65.
Palantir Intelligence, https://www.palantir.com/solutions/intelligence/.
- 66.
Quentin Hardy, “Unlocking Secrets, If Not Its Own Values”, The New York Times, May 31, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/business/unlocking-secrets-if-not-its-own-value.html?
- 67.
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Kammourieh, L. et al. (2017). Group Privacy in the Age of Big Data. In: Taylor, L., Floridi, L., van der Sloot, B. (eds) Group Privacy. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 126. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46608-8_3
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