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An exercise I gave my students helps illustrate the risks to privacy in our everyday, offline lives.
By Kate Klonick
Dr. Klonick is a lawyer.
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Concerns about digital privacy — What is Facebook doing with our data? How are advertisers tracking our interests? How can we stop the breaches that put our personal information at risk? — have received much-needed attention in recent months, but there’s another aspect of privacy that should be on our minds, too: Many of us underestimate the ways in which ubiquitous technology like search engines on a smartphone in the hands of a stranger can compromise our privacy in our everyday lives.
I teach information privacy to law students. I gave my class an optional exercise to complete over spring break that illustrated the difference between the privacy we think we have when we’re in public and the privacy we actually have.
The instructions were straightforward: At some point in the next two weeks, try to determine a stranger’s identity, in a public place, using only Google search on your phone, based on things the stranger said loudly enough for lots of others to hear and things that are displayed on the person’s clothing or bags, like logos or a monogram.
[Never be uninteresting. Read the most thought-provoking, funny, delightful and raw stories from The New York Times Opinion section.]
The activity was designed to illustrate a theory explored by Irwin Altman in the 1975 book “The Environment and Social Behavior: Privacy, Personal Space, Territory, Crowding”: People will assume anonymity in public and then reveal various levels of private information given what they believe their environment to be and what tools might be available to manage disclosure.
By Kate Klonick
Dr. Klonick is a lawyer.
- March 8, 2019
Image
Concerns about digital privacy — What is Facebook doing with our data? How are advertisers tracking our interests? How can we stop the breaches that put our personal information at risk? — have received much-needed attention in recent months, but there’s another aspect of privacy that should be on our minds, too: Many of us underestimate the ways in which ubiquitous technology like search engines on a smartphone in the hands of a stranger can compromise our privacy in our everyday lives.
I teach information privacy to law students. I gave my class an optional exercise to complete over spring break that illustrated the difference between the privacy we think we have when we’re in public and the privacy we actually have.
The instructions were straightforward: At some point in the next two weeks, try to determine a stranger’s identity, in a public place, using only Google search on your phone, based on things the stranger said loudly enough for lots of others to hear and things that are displayed on the person’s clothing or bags, like logos or a monogram.
[Never be uninteresting. Read the most thought-provoking, funny, delightful and raw stories from The New York Times Opinion section.]
The activity was designed to illustrate a theory explored by Irwin Altman in the 1975 book “The Environment and Social Behavior: Privacy, Personal Space, Territory, Crowding”: People will assume anonymity in public and then reveal various levels of private information given what they believe their environment to be and what tools might be available to manage disclosure.
Opinion | A ‘Creepy’ Assignment: Pay Attention to What Strangers Reveal in Public
