Privacy, Technology

Cyber Privacy: Who Owns Your Information?

What are some easy steps that you can take to protect your privacy online?

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It’s getting harder and harder to protect one’s privacy, and lawyers know this as well as any other group. Thanks to threats ranging from Big Brother law firms to the Ashley Madison hack to aggressive prosecutors, lawyers are more exposed than ever.

In the digital age, who can access your data, and for what purposes? On Saturday I attended an interesting and lively New Yorker Festival event tackling these and other tough questions. The distinguished panelists:

The panel began with the participants explaining their interest in and connection to the topic of privacy. Cindy Cohn of EFF framed her interest in privacy as flowing from her interest in the internet more generally: as “a little girl from Iowa,” she got excited about the internet’s power to let people access information without regard to geography, and she got involved in internet legal issues early in the development of the web. The internet is fundamentally about both free speech and privacy, two interests that she defends vigorously through her work at EFF, and the two values go together: “I don’t think you can have a free society unless you have both.”

Barton Gellman has been intimately involved with privacy issues through his Pulitzer-winning work covering the government surveillance programs unveiled by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. In the wake of Snowden’s revelations, Gellman noted, surveillance programs have been modified, lawsuits that were dismissed on standing grounds have been resurrected, and technology companies are emphasizing to the public how hard they are working to protect customer privacy. In short, Snowden “set off processes that are quite significant, quite powerful, and still ongoing.”

Nick Denton of Gawker comes at privacy from a very different angle, as someone whose journalism often strips away privacy — in the service of values like transparency and accountability. He launched Gawker in an effort to expose “the story behind the story, the conversational version of the story, which usually gets closer to the truth” than the sanitized version that winds up in the newspaper or on the television news.

This mission sometimes involves Denton and Gawker incurring the wrath of celebrities claiming privacy violations — for example, professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, who’s suing Gawker for $100 million for posting excerpts of his sex tape online. Denton cited Hogan as an example of a celebrity wanting to put out a particular version of his life and then reacting negatively when the media calls him out. According to Denton, Hogan and similar celebrities are exploiting the general public’s growing anxiety about privacy issues to presented manipulated versions of their own celebrity lives.

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Cindy Cohn jumped in to say that while she is a strong defender of both free speech and privacy, in the Hulk Hogan case she sides with Gawker. Hogan has spoken publicly and explicitly about his own sex life, “talking about stuff that makes me blush, and I don’t blush easily.” So it’s only fair for media outlets like Gawker to point out when he’s lying. She described Hulk Hogan v. Gawker as a “dream case” for EFF, which led Denton to quip, “Your dream case is my nightmare.” (The Hulk Hogan case has been expensive to defend and, depending on how it turns out, could threaten to Gawker’s continued viability.)

Most of the discussion, however, focused on the threats to individual privacy posed by the government rather than the media. Both Cohn and Gellman sounded critical notes about various U.S. government surveillance programs, arguing that some of them run afoul of the limits of the Constitution. As Gellman argued, “Inefficiency in law enforcement is sometimes a feature, not a bug.” It might be more efficient for police to conduct searches without warrants, but that’s not the balance struck by the Fourth Amendment between national security and personal privacy.

So what can be done to improve privacy protections today? The panelists didn’t express much confidence in government solutions. Although the FTC and FCC are starting to take some steps in the right direction, according to Cohn, at a legislative level there’s a lack of political will to tackle these issues. Given current Congressional dysfunction, it’s incumbent upon individuals to take steps to protect their privacy (if privacy is actually something they value). Here are some recommendations from the panelists:

  • Pay attention to the privacy policies of companies and the terms of service of websites, and support those companies that respect your privacy. A number of tech companies are fairly strong on privacy issues, including Apple (with its encrypted iPhones) and Microsoft (fighting government efforts to access customer email).
  • Accept updates on your hardware and software, instead of just leaving them untouched (“You have 73 updates waiting to be installed.”). Often these updates patch security vulnerabilities that can be taken advantage of by hackers.
  • Seek out online resources to help you on this front, such as EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense Guide.

Private companies and government entities often want to invade your privacy as much as possible, for making money or for preventing terrorism or for some other purpose, noble or ignoble. At the end of the day, how much privacy you enjoy is largely up to you.

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Cyber Privacy: Who owns your information? [New Yorker Festival]

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