Abstract
Over fifty years ago, Charles Reich posited that we should extend property protections to what he would call “government largess”: that array of interests—from licenses to welfare benefits—that often form the bases for one’s economic existence in the modern world. Reich considered such protections essential to the preservation of individual autonomy, the independence that is critical to a functioning democracy. Today, our most personal information and even our thoughts, as reflected in our online activities and digital existence, are subject to “private largess.” Private entities possess information central to the identity of those individuals who utilize their services. This information exists in a digital “upside down,” to borrow a phrase from popular culture: an almost parallel universe or shadow world where our most intimate details are open to inspection and acquisition by third parties without our informed consent. Indeed, only a relatively weak set of institutions stand in the way, if they offer any resistance at all, to the sharing of such information by these entities in ways that undermine what I refer to throughout this piece as the integrity of identity: what should be a protected sphere of personal interests, desires, affiliations, and even our beliefs that make up the self. As we face calls for greater surveillance in the throes of the novel coronavirus (SARSCoV- 2) crisis, concerns that privacy protections will further erode loom large. Moreover, any crisis-intervention measures may never be rolled back when the acute crisis dissipates.
While much privacy scholarship focuses on the personal, individual, and private rights such risks to privacy entail, I will focus on the dangers these threats pose to democracy by undermining the integrity of identity and the collective goods that democracy produces. In a landmark article, Calabresi and Melamed argued that we should protect different entitlements through those rules that produce desired results in society, including solving collective action problems. They would classify these different approaches as either property, liability, or alienability rules. This Article draws from and builds upon the work of Reich, Calabresi, and Melamed to argue that, as in several property law contexts, from the mortgage market to zoning, where we use what I call “hybrid” rules— rules that combine elements of property, liability and alienability approaches—to solve collective action problems, we should see the problem of privacy in the digital world as a collective action problem that requires similar, hybrid solutions. Indeed, this Article argues for a form of what I call digital zoning that utilizes all three approaches in the Calabresi and Melamed taxonomy through hybrid rules to help preserve privacy, autonomy, and self-determination in the digital world.
DOI
10.26054/0DYH3J6ANJ
Recommended Citation
Raymond H. Brescia, Zoning Cyberspace: Protecting Privacy in the Digital Upside Down, 2021 ULR 1219 (2021). https://doi.org/10.26054/0DYH3J6ANJ