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Meeting the Risks of Generativity: Privacy 2.0 229
our digital spaces. People ought to be able to express a choice to deemphasize if
not entirely delete older information that has been generated about them by
and through various systems: political preferences, activities, youthful likes and
dislikes. If every action ends up on one’s “permanent record,” the press conference
effect can set in. Reputation bankruptcy has the potential to facilitate desirably
experimental social behavior and break up the monotony of static communities
online and offline. 131 As a safety valve against excess experimentation,
perhaps the information in one’s record could not be deleted selectively; if
someone wants to declare reputation bankruptcy, we might want it to mean
throwing out the good along with the bad. The blank spot in one’s history indicates
a bankruptcy has been declared—this would be the price one pays for
eliminating unwanted details.
The key is to realize that we can make design choices now that work to capture
the nuances of human relations far better than our current systems, and
that online intermediaries might well embrace such new designs even in the absence
of a legal mandate to do so.
More, Not Less, Information
Reputation bankruptcy provides for the possibility of a clean slate. It works best
within informationally hermetic systems that generate their own data through
the activities of their participants, such as a social networking site that records
who is friends with whom, or one that accumulates the various thumbs-up and
thumbs-down array that could be part of a “How’s My Driving”–style judgment.
But the use of the Internet more generally to spread real-world information
about people is not amenable to reputation bankruptcy. Once injected into the
Net, an irresistible video of an angry teacher, or a drunk and/or racist celebrity,
cannot be easily stamped out without the kinds of network or endpoint control
that are both difficult to implement and, if implemented, unacceptably corrosive
to the generative Internet. What happens if we accept this as fact, and also
assume that legal proscriptions against disseminating sensitive but popular data
will be highly ineffective 132 We might turn to contextualization: the idea, akin
to the tort of false light, that harm comes from information plucked out of the
rich thread of a person’s existence and expression. 133 We see this in political
controversies—even the slightest misphrasing of something can be extracted
and blown out of proportion. It is the reason that official press conferences are
not the same as bland conversation; they are even blander.
Contextualization suggests that the aim of an informational system should