Information age set to collide with right to privacy issues

Updated 10:00 AM October 20, 2003

Information age set to collide with right to privacy issues

By Michelle Begnoche
University Record Intern

Society is on a collision course between a need for information and a desire for privacy.

This was the message Kenneth Prewitt, professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University and former director of the U.S. Bureau of the Census, delivered during the Oct. 10 event entitled Privacy in the Information Age: A Symposium in Honor of the 40th Anniversary of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). ICPSR is the world's largest computerized social science archive and part of the Institute for Social Research (ISR).

"Information collecting is integral to the founding of the democratic state," Prewitt said. "Because of this, we grant the state the right to inquire of the population. That is to say, take a census."

This harvesting of information has been able to co-exist with people's privacy over the years by developing two important distinctions, Prewitt said. The distinctions are between privacy and confidentiality, and personal and aggregate data.

However, this co-existence is reaching the end of its life, Prewitt predicted.

"The arrival of a transparent society is blurring the distinctions that have served us quite well in keeping both privacy and information," he said.

The changing dynamics between information and privacy are especially relevant to census data collection, he said.

"Official statistics make the society legible to the state," Prewitt said. "The census maps social terrain of a society."

It is systematic statistical data that makes government policies transparent to the public, Prewitt said, adding, "The government goes out of its way to make their statistics available."

Prewitt went on to say the United States has been extremely ambitious in its collection and dissemination of social statistics. At the same time, however, strong support for privacy remains in the political leadership of the country.

"When push comes to shove, the political leadership of this society says privacy is an integral part of it [society]," Prewitt said.

One difficulty in resolving the information/privacy conflict is the lack of any constitutional guideline for privacy rights of citizens.

"It [the Constitution] doesn't speak clearly or explicitly on this point," Prewitt said, calling on the ICPSR members to initiate research that would identify what constitutes privacy in an information age.

The event was well-attended by people from universities throughout the country.

Three other presentations were given at the symposium.

Edward Goldman, U-M assistant general counsel, talked about how this dichotomy affects the legal profession. "We are in an era where technology is making it easier to get data and the legal system is running hard to catch up," he said. "There is not a good set of laws or regulations to solve this problem."

Robert Groves, director of the Survey Research Center at ISR, warned, "The distinction between data with an edge and statistics that are objective is getting blurred."

Kevin Schurer, professor of history at the University of Essex, said people must be careful how they determine what information is entitled to be private. "The things that really infringe on my privacy are found out through an informal network of information and misinformation," he said.

The symposium opened with comments from David Featherman, director of ISR, and President Mary Sue Coleman, who congratulated ICPSR on its 40th anniversary.

Information age set to collide with right to privacy issues

More Stories