In the second half of the book, Strahilivitz does a good job of laying out why we should support the reputation revolution. Since exclusion is going to happen anyway, and statistical discrimination is a fact of life that is difficult to regulate, open access to people’s history will be beneficial. The more information we have, the less deadweight loss will be associated with inefficient proxies. Assuming this is true, and the end of privacy is both beneficial and imminent, it seems that from a policy perspective we now must determine how we will regulate this open access to people’s individual histories. Strahilivitz touches on what I think is one very important aspect, that is limiting certain information to certain markets (such as medical records to medical industry actors and employment evaluations to future employers). This will not only make people feel more comfortable, but it will also ensure doctors, employers, etc. are candid in what they have to say. If we implement a public online data bank, this would be an important restriction.
The other thing I kept thinking about while reading was the case of the nineteen-year-old kid who doesn’t truly understand how a credit card works. Or the employee who gets a bad review because she had a horrible relationship with deranged boss. Shouldn’t these people have the opportunity to have these things off their reputation record? After all, a person’s credit score can be rehabilitated after a bankruptcy and their insurance rates decrease after so many months of being accident free. This is done because we as a society generally believe that people can change the way they live their lives and should not be tied forever to a bad decision they made when they were younger. It seems that if the regime Strahilivitz is proposing were to be implemented, a similar ability to move forward from past transgressions after a certain number of years would be vital to making sure people aren’t being wrongly excluded.
Under a system where only your last, say, seven years of history are documented, most of the benefits of information access that Strahilivitz discusses would still exist. It is unlikely that only having access to seven years of information would cause people to revert back to statistical discrimination. At the same time, there would be the added benefit of people knowing that their actions today will not haunt them for the rest of their lives.
A drop off date would not be necessary for all kinds of information, just that which would be used to exclude people. Since producers are not usually looking to exclude any customer, there seems little harm in keeping a person’s purchasing history and particular tastes around. More likely than not, the producer will throw out old data it perceives it to be useless anyway. And since the government would likely not get into the business of storing our Amazon histories, it seems there would be little difficulty in distinguishing between consumer and non-consumer information.
I should say that I don’t know how I feel about a public data system that is online. Part of me sees this whole regime as a way to make discrimination less expensive. However, if one is going to be created, it seems that some safeguards would need to be in place to make sure that people have a chance to change their paths in life.
Comments