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Protection of information and the right to privacy - A new equilibrium?
Floridi L., Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated, Cham, Switzerland, 2014. 144 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319057-19-4)
Date Reviewed: Aug 28 2014

This slim volume arose from a 2013 international workshop on the “Protection of Information and the Right to Privacy.” The editor maintains that digital communication has complicated the “balance that liberal societies must find between freedom of information (understood as freedom of speech and as the opposite of censorship), security, and privacy” (p. v). The gap identified here is that standard legal and ethical frameworks need to be “supplemented and complemented by new conceptual solutions” (p. vi). All of the book’s papers address the issues brought on by the proliferation of digital data.

The selected European and American contributors address a better conceptual design’s balance between traditional liberal societies and the issues brought on by enormous amounts of personal data collected by various entities. The authors address the right to be forgotten and legal memories (location data, purpose binding, and contextual integrity), digital due process, the political economy of data, multiagent systems, and an ethical framework for information warfare.

The authors then describe their salient points while attempting to create balanced conceptual designs. According to Sartor, access to data should be restricted over time. For example, the public has a right to know the news; yet, over time, individuals harmed by the release of information also have rights so that the stigma attached to the initial release of public information is minimized. He favors sanctioning the contributed distribution of information for the uploader of data and refraining from punishing persistent publication from an authority (p. 14). Accordingly, Pagallo and Durante extend the right to be forgotten philosophically, legally, and politically. In Europe, the legal right to be forgotten has been recognized for some time, but the persistent nature of digital data has resulted in several court decisions that have reaffirmed this right. Philosophically, they argue, we have the right to present ourselves with our own chosen identity.

Hildebrandt argues that location data is best served by boundary work between politics, health, employment, and economic markets. However, economic markets ought not overrule all other overlapping spheres of life. Nunziato argues that with great power comes great responsibility. As a result of this enormous power, information and communications technology (ICT) companies have amassed enormous amounts of data. So that control will not remain exclusively captive to institutional polices, she argues that they should be required to follow the due process principles implicit in the free speech ideas and jurisprudence of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and the US Constitution. Data privacy legislation, according to Lee-Makiyama, will lead to important redistributive effects. Floridi, also the editor, advances the idea that new informational multiagent systems be designed in such a way that a political multiagent system borrows from informational ethics and supplements the post-Westphalian nation state. Finally, Taddeo argues for a just war theory that integrates information ethics.

Since balance is key for all the contributions, there are three sections that are of particular note and importance. Consider the Nunziato paper, for example, which points out that France can displace Yahoo’s American-based understanding of free speech by restricting content. A French court ruled that Yahoo bears liability in a free speech case. Thus, liberal societies must balance individual rights and social responsibility, and the varying international understandings of those ideas. In this instance, the American protection of free speech was trumped by the more restrictive French understanding. On the other hand, Turkey could not impose its restrictive notion of free speech on the rest of the world served by ICT companies such as Google.

More importantly, international relations, as a result of multiagent systems, have become hyper-historical according to Floridi, and as a result are not best served by historically bound nation states such as Turkey, France, or the US. Floridi contends that as early as 1944, with Bretton Woods and its subsequent supranational entities such as the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the post-Westphalian, hyper-historical transition emerged. Global issues and problems are best addressed by multiagent systems.

An important aspect of the post-Westphalian situation is accelerated by the demise of the state, and the rise of nonstate actors, within an ethical framework for information warfare addressed by Taddeo. This latest revolution in military affairs is information warfare (IW), which is not adequately covered by just war theory; however, according to Taddeo, if just war theory is informed by information ethics, then certain sound principles can be proposed. Taddeo argues that just war theory is a necessary but insufficient tool for IW. Just war theory needs to extend to nonhuman and nonphysical entities harmed by IW.

This volume compares favorably to a more standard and less computer-based work: Privacy rights: moral and legal foundations [1].

Reviewer:  G. Mick Smith Review #: CR142675 (1412-1047)
1) Moore, A. D. Privacy rights: moral and legal foundations. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA, 2010.
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