This weekend it emerged that administrators at Harvard University had secretly searched the emails of resident deans looking for the source of a leak to the news media about a student cheating scandal. “News of the e-mail searches prolonged the fallout from the cheating scandal, in which about 70 students were forced to take a leave from school for collaborating or plagiarizing on a take-home final exam in a government class last year,” reported the New York Times.
“I think what the administration did was creepy,” said Mary C. Waters, a sociology professor, adding that “this action violates the trust I once had that Harvard would never do such a thing.”
But had the Harvard administrators been able to read two new research studies from fellow universities at Chicago (US) and Cambridge (UK), they might either have not needed to search, or may have simply refrained from doing so. The Chicago paper, Toward a positive theory of privacy law, goes into some detail about the winners and losers in the privacy debates. “Having too much privacy can be as bad as having too little,” it says. It suggests that privacy has been wrongly categorized as consumers demanding privacy, and firms who are harmed by them. But, “In reality, privacy regulations harm many consumers and firms. They also benefit different consumers and firms.”
The problem with privacy law, it suggests, is that it is often reactionary – responding more to events than developing objective principles. Even Big Data, it suggests, is no different. It “will harm a great many consumers. It will benefit a great many too. It is by no means clear whether the trend will create net social welfare losses. And at the end of the day, it may not matter.” One of the problems, and the reason for privacy battles, is that everyone is already predisposed to one side or the other, effectively in “voting blocs bound together by personalities, worldviews, and other demographic characteristics.” It concludes that “When humans go to war, we usually have our reasons.”
Since deans in a university are likely to belong primarily to the privacy activist side, then ‘war’ would be inevitable following the secret email searches. But had the administrators also read the Cambridge paper, Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior, they might not have needed to search anyway.
In many ways the Cambridge paper supports and reinforces the Chicago view – there are winners and losers on all sides. But what Cambridge further suggests is that for many consumers who might prefer to be private, the battle is already lost. The Cambridge study shows that Facebook Likes “can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender.” They might even disclose potential leakers: “it may be possible to reveal other attributes as well.”
The potential for misuse of this capability is clear. “Commercial companies, governmental institutions, or even one’s Facebook friends could use software to infer attributes such as intelligence, sexual orientation, or political views that an individual may not have intended to share.” But the paper also stresses potential benefits (or as Chicago says, loss of privacy has both winners and losers): “inference based on observations of digitally recorded behavior may open new doors for research in human psychology,” suggests the paper.
“It is our hope,” concludes the paper, clearly indicating that the authors already belong to one of Chicago’s pre-disposed blocs, “that the trust and goodwill among parties interacting in the digital environment can be maintained by providing users with transparency and control over their information, leading to an individually controlled balance between the promises and perils of the Digital Age.” The opposing bloc will simply assume that this new technical capability will inevitably be used against them by commerce and government.