A Theory of Privacy as Rules
Target Corporation’s famous use of big data to predict which of its customers were pregnant involved a potent cocktail of behavioral science and data science to influence customers’ behavior without their knowledge. In Target’s case, it sent coupons to pregnant women so as to habituate them into becoming long-term Target customers. Its real lesson is that human information confers the power to control human behavior. Rather than thinking principally about defining privacy, we should think about regulating to protect people from the power that human information confers. This conclusion has four important implications. First, it reveals that privacy is fundamentally about power—power over human beings in society. Second, struggles over “privacy” are really struggles over the rules that constrain the power that human information confers. Third, privacy rules of some sort are inevitable. Fourth, privacy should be thought of in instrumental terms to promote human values.