Understanding Privacy

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2010), "Understanding Privacy", Library Review, Vol. 59 No. 7, pp. 562-563. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242531011065163

Privacy attracts so much discussion (often more heat than light) that it is reasonable to wonder why another book is needed about it. This one, however, does useful work in sorting out the issues and adding to transparency. Solove is a law academic at George Washington University Law School and rightly suggests that, what with all the abstract (philosophical, sociological, cultural theory and so forth) and practice‐based (what the courts do and say, and how privacy problems really emerge in individual lives, in families, in companies and in society) debate about it, it is no surprise that we need occasionally to step back and get our bearings.

Understanding Privacy will do this for many readers, legal specialists and others. It will be a useful book for anyone studying privacy in the context of information gathering and processing, data protection and confidentiality, identity theft and forms of social control and surveillance. Its reasonable price, too, will bring it within the reach of the modestly funded library (more likely college and academic than public) and even within personal budgets.

The argument is convincing – that abstract generalisations about privacy take us only so far and that traditionalist assumptions and definitions are often rigid. Solove wants us to look bottom‐up at privacy, the fact and the process and the concept, and to focus on privacy problems. He picks up on the pragmatism from writers like John Dewey which is distrustful of abstraction and asks us to look at specific situations, at the contexts within which things actually happen, at the conflicts of interests that apply in them, at modern pluralism. Distortions have grown up – such as regarding privacy as a matter more for individuals (and individualism set against societal concerns at that). The paradox – for any legal reader – is that case law highlights the specific situation (albeit with reference to doctrine, principle and precedent), and Solove (again rightly) provides plenty of case law (virtually all US law federal and state law) to support his analysis.

Having set that out, Solove then develops a taxonomy for privacy that most readers will find useful (and many readers who are lecturers will gulp down as a convenient structure for new lectures and seminars). The taxonomy hinges on four things – information collection, information processing, information dissemination and invasion. For anyone working in the increasingly converged field of law and information, the taxonomy will have an immediate appeal, even obviousness (its obviousness is part of its strength).

Collection includes surveillance and interrogation (pressure to divulge), and here Solove examines it with reference to the Fifth Amendment (the one on self‐incrimination). Processing picks up on database information, freedom of information, data and dignity and human rights, identity theft and resulting harms, access and informed consent. Dissemination includes confidentiality and its breach (signposts here to a wider literature on tort), balances between free speech and autonomy, arguments for and against the free flow of information, the notion of “speaking beyond expected boundaries” (a nice one, this), exposure and appropriation (name and likeness theft, intangible property in product endorsement and defamation). Invasion covers things like interference (by the state in personal matters like sex), balances where there are health implications, how far to go with obscenity controls, and balances between self‐indulgent solitude and social responsibility.

The menu is a good one, and it is well supported by a judicious selection of US cases, all of which brings out the issues clearly. The approach, as Solove says, is bottom‐up, problem‐specific and pragmatic (in the philosophical sense), and the aim is to create a new understanding of privacy (chapter 6 heading) and to reconstruct privacy (chapter 3 heading). Subtle, too, is the analysis of the value of privacy (in chapter 4) where, contrasting intrinsic and instrumental value, Solove explores the pragmatic value of privacy, given conflicting cultural pressures, harms and outcomes. Too much privacy makes the growth of social norms impossible, too little creates totalitarianism.

However expert he is at arguing for problem‐specific approaches, he drifts inevitably into wider and more sociological ideas, and his book is all the more realistic for that. As Rosen (2006) argues in his recent Law as Culture, the law is not, and cannot be, separate from life, for all its status as an identifiably separate area of work and experience. Its cultural roots are central to an understanding of what it does and what it is for. In Understanding Privacy, Solove devises a practical and unpretentious framework for looking at privacy afresh, and his approach, and the taxonomy it leads to, is one accessible to the general reader and the student as well as to the legal and information specialist. The book includes some 40 pages of notes (good for following up the numerous sources) and an elegant index (there is no formal bibliography). Early chapters set out what has been said before and why we need to move on. A most attractive study for general use and a good source for academic work.