Response to Privacy as a Public Good

Most of the legal, philosophical, and social-science thinking about privacy emphasizes its value to the individual with less attention to its value to society. Professors Fairfield and Engel join a growing number of privacy scholars who are probing privacy’s value to society and policy options to protect privacy’s social value. They signal its social importance and also underscore weaknesses in current policies designed to protect privacy: “Inattention to privacy’s publicgood nature has led privacy policy astray.” They seek to explain how, and why, informed individuals who highly value privacy act in ways that reduce the privacy of others and of society. They explore how to help “promote collective action on privacy” in order to avoid or to remedy what they appropriately refer to as a “social dilemma.” Applying behavioral economics to identify new approaches to privacy protection, they recommend four primary changes in approach: 1) a focus on empowering groups; 2) leveraging inequity aversion, reciprocity, and normativity to lessen exploitation among group members; 3) positive framing to promote altruism; and 4) communication and sanction as key components of group