Public anonymity

Issues in Science and Technology, Winter 2005 by Morgan, James N, Sweeney, William R Jr

"Protecting Public Anonymity," by M. Granger Morgan and Elaine Newton (Issues, Fall 2004), deals with one problem by exacerbating another. If someone breaks into my home, I don't expect the authorities to punish me for carelessness but to punish the perpetrator. Yet most of the methods for protecting anonymity put the burden on those who collect or manage databases. Why not a clearer definition of what an abuse is and of punishments for the abusers?

We already allow the merging of databases with information about individuals, because a great deal of research requires a lot of information about each individual, not for revelation but for statistical purposes. It is true that even statistical findings can lead to stereotyped conclusions about subgroups in society, but that can be reduced by proper presentations of results.

Important survey research uses personal interviews to collect much information directly from individuals, but highly productive improvements in the data can be made economically by adding information from other sources, ranging from data sets with individuals identified to those containing information about the area where a person lives or the nature of his or her occupation. And great reductions can be made in respondents' burdens if some information can be made available from other sources. Methodologically, we can learn about response error and improve the data by comparing data from more than one source. Explanations of situation or behavior must allow for complex interaction effects.

We already have protections when personal data are merged, and to prohibit the ransacking of data to reveal individuals. At the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, we have been collecting rich individual data for years, including the use of reinterview panels, without any case of loss of anonymity.

JAMES N. MORGAN

Senior Research Scholar Emeritus

Institute for Social Research

Professor of Economics Emeritus

University of Michigan

Ann Arbor, Michigan

jnmorgan@ isr.umich.edu

The challenge to our society is to calibrate the balance between personal privacy and society's security in accord with the constant evolution of technology. This public policy debate has to include the full participation of academics, business leaders, civil libertarians, law enforcement, national security, and technologists with our elected political leaders who reflect the attitudes of the citizens.

The challenge is global because technology erases national borders but cannot eliminate the cultural and historical attitudes on the individual issues of personal privacy and national security as well as their convergence. Europe's attitudes, for example, on the convergence of these issues are shaped by the historic experiences of Nazi occupation and by recent domestic terrorism in England, Ireland, Italy, Germany, France, and Spain. Other areas such as Hong Kong, Australia, and Japan have distinct national ideas about privacy.

Companies such as EDS are engaged in dialogues and partnerships with the U.S. government as well as governments in Europe, Asia, and Latin America and with multilateral governmental organizations to determine a process that reflects the consensus of all the participants in the robust debate about the "balance" between personal privacy and security. This global conversation is vertical and horizontal, because some information-personal financial and health records, for example-is particularly sensitive and is therefore more regulated. EDS has been involved in this discussion for well over 10 years and plans to continue its engagement in these public/private dialogues for years to come.

The article by M. Granger Morgan and Elaine Newton was troublesome, because there was the suggestion that anonymity was somehow a "right" in the United States. I disagree. In an era of search engines and digitization of records, people aren't anonymous. That's a reality. Controls can be put in place to provide privacy protections and punish actual abuses and serious crimes such as identity theft, but the idea that complete personal anonymity is possible, much less a "right" in the United States, is naive and simplistic. Frankly, after September 11, every passenger and crew member on the airplane feels more secure because they know every other passenger was "screened" by the same regime, and no one is really anonymous to the authorities.

At the same time, the article was constructive, because there was the strong suggestion that a privacy/security regime could be instituted voluntarily in partnership with business, which frankly is more sensitive to the realities of the market, technology, and our customers' concerns than is government regulation.

Sometimes, there is amnesia about a central fact: The customer sets the rules, because the customer is the final arbiter. Remember: If privacy is the issue, as in the financial and healthcare sectors, then the processes adapt to that concern. If security is the issue, as in airline travel, then the processes adapt to that concern as was demonstrated in the recent negotiations between the United States and the European Union on airline passenger lists. If there is customer concern about data from radio frequency identification devices, then the rules and business practices will evolve to address those concerns. Sometimes, the government will prod the process forward. In this space of privacy and security convergence with technology deployment, the odds are that government regulation is a lagging indicator.