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It's my growing opinion that the aggregation of personal data (and "metadata") needs to be regulated. Individual sample points are fine, but analyzing the enti

It's my growing opinion that the aggregation of personal data (and "metadata") needs to be regulated. Individual sample points are fine, but analyzing the entire crowd all the time is too intrusive and should constitute a warrant-requiring search of private effects. Maybe we need something like HIPPA for personal data. If you start fiddling with stuff that invades privacy of individuals, things should get touchy and messy legally. I have an expectation of privacy in public while in crowds and during my personal travels.

zerocrates 10y ago
This is the idea behind the nascent "mosaic" theory of the Fourth Amendment: that by aggregating together many individual observations that each in themselves aren't a "search," you arrive at a result that gives you so much information about a person and their activities that the aggregate program would be a search that required a warrant. Put another way, each individual "tile" of a search program might not be so controversial, like police being able to take your photo in public, but a mosaic formed by aggregating photos of you automatically taken every block and matching them to your drivers' license photo becomes far more problematic, privacy-wise: the whole is more invasive than the sum of its parts. The theory has made a minor appearance in at least one Supreme Court case: U.S. v. Jones, where police placed a GPS tracker on a car and didn't comply with the restrictions of the warrant they'd obtained to do so. The holding went against the government, but the mosaic theory only featured in a concurrence. The decision was based not around the invasion of privacy inherent in round-the-clock automated location monitoring but instead on the rather mundane and case-specific fact that the police committed a "trespass" to the car by sticking the device magnetically to its underside. It's a tough case because it's really the plummeting cost that's changing things: round-the-clock warrantless public surveillance is legal and basically uncontroversial if done the traditional way, by sticking police officers in a car and following you around. But the growing ability to get the same information at massive scale, at minimal marginal cost, and even retroactively is... not so uncontroversial. The Court, and courts generally, are still firmly in the camp of analyzing searches individually and not in aggregate, but there are glimmers of change on the horizon.
- white-flame 10y ago
  A HIPPA-style regulation would go beyond government use. I want private companies to have to treat aggregated personal information with the same delicacy and punishments as for medical records.
  - zerocrates 10y ago
    You might well see something in the realm of HIPAA aimed at the Googles and Facebooks of the world relatively soon. I'd have to believe that the federal government, and law enforcement generally, would be excluded from such a law, though (in much the same way they're already excluded from HIPAA itself). Even assuming otherwise, laws restricting what the government itself can do aren't always terribly robust (see, for example, the Patriot Act). I appreciate the idea that private companies are as much or possibly more of a concern in this space as the government, but the problems of the two really move in concert. As the scope of data Google has on you grows, so does the power of the third-party doctrine.

zerocrates 10y ago

This is the idea behind the nascent "mosaic" theory of the Fourth Amendment: that by aggregating together many individual observations that each in themselves aren't a "search," you arrive at a result that gives you so much information about a person and their activities that the aggregate program would be a search that required a warrant. Put another way, each individual "tile" of a search program might not be so controversial, like police being able to take your photo in public, but a mosaic formed by aggregating photos of you automatically taken every block and matching them to your drivers' license photo becomes far more problematic, privacy-wise: the whole is more invasive than the sum of its parts. The theory has made a minor appearance in at least one Supreme Court case: U.S. v. Jones, where police placed a GPS tracker on a car and didn't comply with the restrictions of the warrant they'd obtained to do so. The holding went against the government, but the mosaic theory only featured in a concurrence. The decision was based not around the invasion of privacy inherent in round-the-clock automated location monitoring but instead on the rather mundane and case-specific fact that the police committed a "trespass" to the car by sticking the device magnetically to its underside. It's a tough case because it's really the plummeting cost that's changing things: round-the-clock warrantless public surveillance is legal and basically uncontroversial if done the traditional way, by sticking police officers in a car and following you around. But the growing ability to get the same information at massive scale, at minimal marginal cost, and even retroactively is... not so uncontroversial. The Court, and courts generally, are still firmly in the camp of analyzing searches individually and not in aggregate, but there are glimmers of change on the horizon.

white-flame 10y ago
A HIPPA-style regulation would go beyond government use. I want private companies to have to treat aggregated personal information with the same delicacy and punishments as for medical records.
- zerocrates 10y ago
  You might well see something in the realm of HIPAA aimed at the Googles and Facebooks of the world relatively soon. I'd have to believe that the federal government, and law enforcement generally, would be excluded from such a law, though (in much the same way they're already excluded from HIPAA itself). Even assuming otherwise, laws restricting what the government itself can do aren't always terribly robust (see, for example, the Patriot Act). I appreciate the idea that private companies are as much or possibly more of a concern in this space as the government, but the problems of the two really move in concert. As the scope of data Google has on you grows, so does the power of the third-party doctrine.