Book contents
- The Privacy Fallacy
- The Privacy Fallacy
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Traditionalist Approach to Privacy
- 2 Privacy Myths
- 3 The Consent Illusion
- 4 Manipulation by Design
- 5 Traditionalist Data Protection Rules
- 6 Pervasive Data Harms
- 7 Privacy as Corporate Accountability
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
2 - Privacy Myths
Rationality and Apathy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 November 2023
- The Privacy Fallacy
- The Privacy Fallacy
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Traditionalist Approach to Privacy
- 2 Privacy Myths
- 3 The Consent Illusion
- 4 Manipulation by Design
- 5 Traditionalist Data Protection Rules
- 6 Pervasive Data Harms
- 7 Privacy as Corporate Accountability
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Chapter 2 shows the falseness of two ideas that underlie the central elements of privacy law: that people make fully rational privacy choices and that they don’t care about their privacy. These notions create a dissonance between law and reality, which prevents laws from providing meaningful privacy protections. Contrary to rationality, context has an outsized impact on our privacy decisions and we can’t understand what risks are involved in our privacy “choices,” particularly with AI inferences. The notion that we’re apathetic is prevalent in popular discourse about how much people share online and the academic literature about “the privacy paradox.” Dismantling the myth of apathy shows there’s no privacy paradox. People simply face uncertainty and unknowable risks. People make privacy choices in a context of anti-privacy design, such as dark patterns. In this process, we’re manipulated by corporations, who are more aware of our biases than regulators are.
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- The Privacy FallacyHarm and Power in the Information Economy, pp. 28 - 45Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023