Ronald Krotoszynski, John S. Stone Chairholder of Law, The
University of Alabama
Moderator: Montré
Carodine, Associate Professor of Law, The University of Alabama
Krotoszynski: potential virtues of a comparative law
perspective. All of the papers reflect
assumptions/understandings from domestic privacy regimes, which won’t
necessarily hold true across national boundaries. Doesn’t mean to suggest we should create global
law of privacy or look for platonic ideal of privacy. Claim only that knowledge of foreign regimes
could assist us in evaluating contemporary arrangements.
Haggerty worries that reasonable expectation standard will
undervalue privacy as surveillance expands.
Maybe not—substantive outcomes matter more than legal frameworks.
Language can be misleading. Reasonable
expectation need not be descriptive; could be normative/aspirational, as Canada
has held it is.
We are not prisoners of tech. France: employers can’t routinely surveil
employees, even to avoid shirking and ensure adequate productivity. Cultural
tide is strong enough to resist.
Vigorously enforced. Suppose Wal-Mart
put cameras in employee bathrooms to monitor productivity—Wal-Mart has a
similar interest in that stall. Yet that’s culturally unthinkable, and the
legal reaction would be swift. (I wish I were this confident of that.)
SCt of Canada decoupled privacy protection from property
ownership—student can claim privacy in data on a computer owned by her school.
US has more often tied privacy to property.
Nomenclature matters less than scope and substance of the rights
protected. Germany doesn’t protect privacy, but it does protect dignity and
personal honor. Interests sounding in privacy in US terms are more
reliably/robustly protected there. A society that expects privacy gets more,
not as reasonable expectations but as a matter of political economy. In the US,
free speech has more cultural/social relevance and thus gets more protection—a function
of social/cultural expectations. Privacy
has more relevance in Europe than here, opposite of free speech.
Austin’s focus on consent v. power, and the role of private
actors. In ECJ, human rights have both
positive and negative dimensions, and aren’t necessarily bounded by property/state
action. State’s duty to safeguard fundamental rights could matter: everyone has
a right to respect—creates a positive obligation in EC. Many US state constitutions have a right to
public education clause. Our general tradition of negative rights doesn’t mean
it’s the only possibility.
Anonymity: societies vary in their tolerance for
anonymity/pseudonymity. Can assist those
without power. But there’s a dark side
to anonymous speech too—empowering gov’t to propagandize population with false
identities. Lyrissa Lidsky has written
on problems of using sock puppets to push gov’t views—TSA has been accused of
doing this on its own websites and on sites like Flyertalk. Impedes democratic
discourse. Koch Bros. also use
anon/pseudon speech to hide their starting points. Trust in gov’t affects
willingness to accept regulations designed to force speakers to disclose their
identities. US citizens distrust gov’t and view speech regulations with
distrust. Canada etc. don’t mind as
much. (This account of distrust is
coherent as limited to speech but can’t explain what’s going on with
surveillance. This is the gov’t we distrust so much, the one reading all our
emails? Conversely, the Europeans don’t seem all that trusting on surveillance.)
World without rules about pseudon. speech might undermine
discourse more than empower it, given the power of corporations. Might undermine confidence in all speech
online—never know if NSA is texting you. Could preclude gov’t/corporations from
engaging in anonymous speech. Predictively, though, SCt isn’t likely to
tolerate that given its rulings on compelled commercial speech. If we had to choose a world that allowed
everyone anonymity, we might be worse off.
If there are political benefits to misattributing speech by powerful,
they will use this modality to their full extent. Cost and difficulty of securing a ballot
initiative, for example, make it much easier for Costco etc to do it than for
grassroots activism. It’s easily to romanticize the web, but it’s also a means
of mass communication for gov’t and corporations. We need to be clear eyed in associating net
social costs.
(But no one in the US ever proposes “net” regulations in
that sense. Like Google+’s real name policy with all its exceptions/failures to
see how it was allowing some people to do what it was barring others from doing,
the regulations are always more situation specific. South Korea’s real name policy is not on the
table here. (And a good thing too!) I think we’ve heard quite a lot about the
harms of anonymous speech; I’m also interested in putting other uses on the
table, especially given that powerful entities will misuse identification as
well as anonymity, as the Koch case amply demonstrates. I’m also not really sure why the First
Amendment would protect pseudonymous gov’t speech, though that gets into
complicated gov’t speech doctrine; at the very least I have trouble
understanding why the First Amendment would preclude
a law against deceptive gov’t speech, as right now the CIA is barred from
propagandizing American citizens.)
Some cultures accept public defecation and sexual
activity. Thus privacy norms aren’t
cross cultural. But even so we can learn from other nations’ privacy laws.
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