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From Victorian Secrets to Cyberspace Shaming

Paul M. Schwartz

Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law; Director, Berkeley Center for Law and Technology

I greatly benefited from a presentation of this Review to a faculty workshop at UCLA School of Law. Many thanks to the faculty there for their helpful comments, and to Jon Michaels and the faculty colloquium committee for the invitation. Thanks as well to Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Frank Zimring for their suggestions. In the interest of full disclosure, I wish to note that Professor Solove and I are coauthors on a casebook, Information Privacy Law (Aspen 3d ed 2009).

Guarding Life’s Dark Secrets: Legal and Social Controls over Reputation, Propriety, and Privacy. Lawrence Friedman. Stanford, 2007. Pp ix, 348.

The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. Daniel J. Solove. Yale, 2007. Pp vii, 247.

Worrying about privacy is a growth industry. The public is highly concerned about how its personal information is collected, stored, and processed. Technology companies compete to create new applications that will analyze personal data and meet new needs, such as the ability to broadcast one’s GPS data to family and friends (no more lunches alone). The government is interested in access to personal data for law enforcement, regulatory, and administrative purposes. And the media, when not reporting on the latest privacy invasions by companies or government, is publishing “tell-all” stories on anyone viewed as newsworthy, that is, deemed worthy of its attention.

Two excellent guides to this cauldron of law, social change, and technology have now been published. These are Lawrence Friedman’s Guarding Life’s Dark Secrets, and Daniel Solove’s The Future of Reputation. The focus of the first book is on past attitudes toward privacy and how the modern legal era of privacy emerged in the twentieth century. It also contains some thoughts about the future of privacy. The second book picks up the story and brings it into the future of the Internet, bloggers, and social networking sites.

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