The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age.

• Author: Harper, Jim
• Position: Book Review

The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age Daniel J. Solove New York: New York University Press, 2004, 283 pp.

There is no better survey of the privacy landscape than Daniel Solove's The Digital Person. The book proceeds thoughtfully but briskly through the major elements of the privacy debate. With important qualifications, this book is a recommended read for people concerned with the threats wrought by increasingly data-heavy modern business processes.

The Digital Person examines the growth of databases and dossiers, assesses the varied laws that protect privacy, explores the privacy consequences of public records and open government, exposes the growing scope of data use by governments, and surveys relevant Fourth Amendment law. It is thoroughly researched and footnoted, giving readers entree to further sources of reading.

Solove's discussion of the privacy torts is a highlight. It is particularly welcome because other scholars and advocates have ignored this baseline privacy protection, acting as if federal statute and bureaucratic regulation were the only influence on individuals and institutions. Indeed, Solove recognizes that contract law and markets, tort law, statutes, and constitutional rights all provide privacy protections one way or another.

On Fourth Amendment law, The Digital Person is particularly good. Solove's analogy between Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928), and United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435 (1976), is delightful. In Olmstead, the Supreme Court found that tapping a phone line outside a person's house was not a Fourth Amendment violation because there was no entry into the home; it was rightly overruled in the landmark decision in Katz v. United States, 389 US 347 (1967).

Miller is one of several cases in which the Court has failed to recognize that Americans' reasonable privacy expectations extend to information that they place with third parties, such as banks, telephone and (now) Internet service providers, and medical practitioners. This case and its kin must also be overruled.

As a survey of the privacy landscape, The Digital Person is quite good. It does not, however, break much new ground and it has important weaknesses of which readers should be wary.

Rather than George Orwell's 1984, Solove proposes to organize privacy thinking around a new metaphor: Franz Kafka's The Trial. In that story, the hapless Joseph K. is declared under arrest by a group of bureaucrats, though...