Taking Privacy Seriously: How to Create the Rights We Need While We Still Have Something to Protect

Other books remind us of what we already know--that privacy is under great pressure. James Rule provides a step-by-step plan to create a significantly more private and authentically democratic world. Taking Privacy Seriously offers both a concise, hard-hitting assessment of the origins of today's privacy-eroding practices and a roadmap for creating robust new individual rights over our personal data. Rule proposes eleven key reforms in the control and use of personal information, all aimed at redressing the balance of power between ordinary citizens and data-hungry corporate and government institutions. What a privacy-deprived America needs most is not less technology, Rule argues, but profound political realignment. His eleven proposed reforms range from launching a major public-works investment consisting of a series of websites publicly documenting the personal data uses of nearly all government and private institutions; to instating a right for any citizen to withdraw from any per