Balancing security and privacy in the 21st century

Abstract

The policy steps taken after 9/11 have fomented a particularly intense and often bitter national debate on privacy versus security. We offer a framework for a middle ground that views privacy as an aggregate of two unrelated concepts: knowledge of behavior and knowledge of identity. We offer a visual metaphor for considering government policy in these two dimensions and argue that the default policy should be one that supports intensive monitoring of behavior with limited knowledge of identity until there is reasonable cause to reveal additional information about identity. Moreover, we argue that whenever behavior and identity are considered together, institutions must have safeguards in place to validate the data and offer an appeals process to redress errors in information systems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.