Editors' Rating
Published: 21 Apr 2008
Think of life as a celebrity. No matter how many autographs you sign and no matter how graciously you deal with your fans day in and day out, there will inevitably be a bad moment when you snarl and refuse — and that's the moment that will be captured and circulated across the entire internet. Ever after, if you're unpleasant to anyone your image as an ungrateful jerk is enhanced; if you're nice you're a hypocrite. Your reputation has preceded you.
The internet imposes this level of scrutiny on all of us, as George Washington University Law School associate professor and privacy advocate Daniel J Solove writes in The Future of Reputation. A young woman fails to clean up her dog's poop on a South Korean train and is outed on the internet and forever after branded 'dog poop girl'. A Washington insider blogs the details of her sex life, naming names and sexual practices. A recognisable name leaves a tip his waitress feels is inadequate, and he gets outed on BitterWaitress.com. A large IT company's customer service shunts a well-known blogger from department to department for an hour without resolving his problem and gets its reputation trashed publicly.
Somewhere in all this the laws protecting free speech and those protecting privacy collide. The libertarian view that prevailed early in the internet's history held that free speech was absolute. But the law as decided by the courts is less clear. True, many cases balancing the public interest against publishing private facts have been decided. But in general these have focused on professional publications: books, magazines, newspapers. Are amateur bloggers writing diaries of their own lives subject to the same restrictions as a professional journalist? Should they be?
Similar questions surround the issue of anonymity in cyberspace. Debates about anonymity long precede the founding of Wikipedia; but that site is a poster child for both sides. Anonymous editing allows bad faith editing; but it also creates a meritocracy in which the quality of the content is more important than the credentials of the person who writes it.
Solove considers these questions in the context of US law. English law protecting confidentiality is stronger than its American counterpart, but the issues, like the internet itself, are the same everywhere. We need, he argues, a more nuanced analysis than the simple categories a binary private-or-public view allows. Users of social networks may expose far more about themselves than they realise, but the key is that they feel they're in control. When Facebook suddenly added a new feature that automatically notified everyone on users' friends lists whenever their profiles were updated, the subsequent outcry was over that loss of control.
His own solution begins with expanding the law's recognition of privacy. But bearing in mind that law cannot cover every situation, he also notes the role of social norms in constraining behaviour. Social-networking sites can help by setting defaults that inhibit sharing information more than the present ones. That is, assuming people care about privacy. If we do, thinking about its future is a matter of urgency.
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