Tarek Fahmy: Cultural Critic

Solove, D. (2006) The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age
New York: New York University Press
Article Link: The Digital Person
—————————–

Notes/Quotes/Paraphrases

• “…everyday, rivulets of information stream into electric brains to be sifted, sorted, rearranged, and combined in hundreds of different ways.” p.1

• “…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

• Digital Dossiers use 3 types of information fow:
1. Information flows between large computer databases of private-sector companies
2. data flows from the government public record systems to a variety of businesses in the private sector.
3. Information flows from the private sector to government agencies and law enforcement officials.

• “In addition to isolating the company’s most profitable customers, marketers studied them, profiled them, and then used that profile to find similar customers.” p.18

• psychographic information = data about psychological characteristics such as opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and lifestyles. p.18

EXAMPLES: Blue blood estates, bohemian mix, young literati, shotguns and pickups. p.19
MORE EXAMPLES: Affluent hispanics, big spending parents, status spenders, waist watchers. p. 22

• The average consumer is on around 100 mailing lists, and is included in at least 50 databases.” p.19

• “The products we consume are expressive of our identities” p. 45

• “We are more the the bits of data we give of as we go about our lives.” p. 46

• “As Julie Cohen observes, people are not simply reducible to the sum of their transactions, genetic markers, and other measurable attributes.” p. 46

• Our digital biographies are very reductive. p. 46

• To maintain a semblance of privacy, we need a governing body to institutes definitions and laws pertaining to information and it’s privacy; Information Privacy law.

• Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis worked extensively on privacy law. p. 57
“In 1890, they wrote their profoundly influential article, “The Right to privacy”, considered by many to be one of the primary foundations of privacy law in the United States.” p. 57

• “…the moral general right of the individual to be left alone.” p. 58

This book costs around $40 on Amazon.com

I don’t have to buy it and can read it online for free!
Right here baby!

Solove, D. (2006) The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age, New York: New York University Press

Gandy, O. (2006) “Data Mining, Surveillance, and Discrimination” in The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility, eds. Haggerty, K. and Ericson R., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 363-84.

Clarke, R. (1988) “Information technology and dataveillance” in Communications of the ACM, 31(5), May 1988: 498-512. Cited in Lyon 2001, p.143