Why You Can No Longer Get Lost in the Crowd
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-17-2019
Publisher
New York Times Company
Language
en-US
Abstract
We are constantly exposed in public. Yet most of our actions will fade into obscurity. Do you, for example, remember the faces of strangers who stood in line with you the last time you bought medicine at a drugstore? Probably not. Thanks to limited memory and norms against staring, they probably don’t remember yours either.
This is what it means to be obscure. And our failure to collectively value this idea shows where we’ve gone wrong in the debates over data and surveillance.
Lawmakers and industry leaders are missing the big picture. They are stuck on traditional concepts like “transparency,” “consent” and “secrecy,” which leads to proposals that reinforce broken mechanisms like consenting to unreadable terms of service. They are operating under the dangerous illusion that there’s a clear distinction between what’s public and what’s private. Most people probably intuitively know that their most deeply held secrets are private while the things about them that are commonly known or widely broadcast are not. But what about information about our everyday actions that is shared with some but not all?
Recommended Citation
Woodrow Hartzog & Evan Selinger,
Why You Can No Longer Get Lost in the Crowd
,
in
New York Times
(2019).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/shorter_works/206
Publisher URL
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/opinion/data-privacy.html
