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Originally Published Oct 1st, 2012 in Ethics Newsline • Posted in: Commentary

by Ethics Newsline editor Carl Hausman

Last week, I addressed a group of international journalists who were touring the United States as part of an educational outreach program. The central question on the minds of a couple of them seemed to be why the United States tolerates — and seemingly condones — media-based dissemination of vicious opinion.

The topic, of course, was the violence related to the Innocence of Muslims film, a slapped-together propaganda piece ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad. Why, our guests wondered, didn’t Google, the corporate parent of YouTube, simply take the piece down, and if they refused (which Google did), why didn’t the government make YouTube pull the video?

While one journalist seemed in full accord with protection of speech and press in general, she asked, in so many words, why the United States can’t be reasonable, defending free speech when it was meaningful but letting the hate-mongers fend for themselves?

There’s no simple answer to that. We do draw the line at many types of expression, including inciting riot, hate speech, and child pornography. But, in general, it is safe to say that the United States historically defends excess, even wretched excess, because the framers of the Constitution and those who have interpreted it have fretted consistently about the slippery slope of suppression.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of free expression in the American ethic. The Declaration of Independence could not have been written, at least not in the form in which it emerged, without the emergence of uncensored mass media.

The printing press survived many skirmishes with the kings and queens of the era who saw it (correctly) as a threat to the established order and imposed harsh licensing laws. Potential penalties for publishing unauthorized material included cutting off the right hand of the offending printer.

The ruling class, it turned out, was exactly right in its fear of the democratizing effects of the printing press. The technology enabled the circulation of philosophical treatises read and admired by the founders, especially Jefferson, who absorbed tracts affirming the existence of basic human rights.

Moreover, the output of the press caused a circular erosion of the power of totalitarian governments because the availability of printed documents spurred greater literacy, which in turn spread the ability to access subversive ideas.

Much of the outrage of American colonists was directed at censorship, and publishers such as Ben Franklin risked the wrath of the crown by publishing without official approval. (And the crown did not mess around when it came to revolution: The penalty for treason was death by public disembowelment.)

After the Revolutionary War, it became obvious that even a people who hated government had to have one, and the founders crafted a Constitution that severely limited the power of elected and appointed officials. Even this careful balancing act didn’t have the full confidence of the citizens who had to ratify the document, so a set of amendments was added to protect against abuses such as unlawful search and seizure, restriction of religious practice, and — perhaps most famously — freedom of speech and of the press.

The First Amendment as it is written seems to offer blanket, complete protection for speech and press and, as such, it proved impractical and more or less unenforceable for more than a century after its establishment. Under the Adams administration, for example, laws were passed that made it a crime to criticize the government. Lincoln shut down newspapers opposed to his Civil War policies and jailed editors.

It wasn’t until World War I — the Unites States’ entry into what for some was a mystifying foreign war, with criticism of that war spread by an increasingly sophisticated mass media — that the Supreme Court was called on to make sense of a Constitution that said Congress (and by extension, no lower arm of government “shall make no law respecting … freedom of speech and of the press,” while at the same time confronting the reality that unbridled speech could pose dangers to security and safety.

In cases involving anti-war protests, Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes devised a calculus that elegantly reconciled the conflict between Constitutional guarantees and wartime realities — the “clear and present danger” doctrine, the theory that falsely shouting Fire! in a crowded theater is not protected expression because it’s not expression at all; rather, the words are like weapons — blunt instruments designed to cause harm — uttered in a situation when there is not time to discuss their propriety. Expression and advocacy thus were covered neatly under the First Amendment umbrella; fighting words, betrayals of allied troop movements, and other dangerous forms of expression with no redeeming merit were left out in the rain.

In the 1960s, protections for free expression were broadened further: In the 1964 Times v. Sullivan case, the court ruled that public figures could not successfully sue for libel unless they not only could prove that the defamatory statement was wrong but that it was made with the intent to harm, and in 1968 the High Court further narrowed the “clear and present danger” test for excluding free-speech protection to the so-called Brandenburg Test, which requires that unprotected speech advocate imminent, lawless, action that is likely to occur.

The Brandenburg case, like the Innocence of Muslims film, involved ugly speech — in that case, the ranting of a KKK leader. But it affirmed the notion that the First Amendment can’t be applied in only the easy cases.

By the Brandenburg test, still the benchmark today, the YouTube film seems to fall under the First Amendment umbrella, according to most analyses, because it does not seek directly to incite violence and the imminence of riots halfway around the world could not reasonably have been foreseen.

So in deference to the continuation of the trend of free-speech protections, I argued to the visiting journalists that giving the benefit of the doubt to dubious advocacy makes us swallow hard and that — in the long run — the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

Writing for a unanimous Supreme Court in a 1940 case involving vituperative speech against the Catholic religions, justice Owen Roberts held that even though the expression was offensive, the right to be boorish is a net benefit in the long run.

“In spite of the probability of excesses and abuses,” read the ruling, “these liberties are, in the long view, essential to enlightened opinion and right conduct on the part of citizens of a democracy.”

To put it another way, and to paraphrase First Amendment scholar Charles Haynes, laws that restrict freedom of speech may — today — protect your sensibilities. But tomorrow, they may be used to censor your beliefs.

©2012 Institute for Global Ethics

Originally posted in Ethics Newsline, Sep 4th, 2012 • Posted in: Commentary

Principle Versus Principal: The Ethical Dimension Of Underwater Mortgages

Aug 6th, 2012 • Posted in: Commentary

by Ethics Newsline editor Carl Hausman

One of the most popular cartoons in the storied history of the New Yorker — depicting two canines sitting before a computer and praising the benefits of online anonymity — became a symbol of the liberating effects of donning an online cloak when it was published in the mid 1990s.

True: Anonymity offers a constellation of benefits both societal and practical.

For starters, it’s the latest in a long line of social lubricants. Masquerade balls, for example, became popular in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance as a means of lowering social barriers. Elaborate court etiquette didn’t apply, dancers could mix and flirt without violating court protocol, and even the most shy and reticent could find relief from their inhibitions.

Chat rooms and online dating sites are pretty much a high-tech reincarnation of that premise, easing initial contact and minimizing the sting of personal rejection.

Second, anonymity has a profoundly egalitarian heritage. Mechanisms of communication always have been among the first targets of tyranny since media existed. The Gutenberg Press, for example, sparked not only a revolution in the sharing of ideas and the standardization of language, but also a new obsession for identifying — occasionally torturing and murdering — the instigators of dissent. In Europe, and later in colonial America, strict licensing on the new printing press was imposed, accompanied by draconian and frequently gruesome retribution against those who used it as an instrument of protest.

Rebellious American Revolutionary intellectuals such as Thomas Paine published anonymous works, including the incendiary pamphlet Common Sense, with profound effect.

Lesser-known (at least in the United States) examples of the liberating power of anonymity persisted throughout many intellectual rebellions. In the Soviet Union of the 1950s and ’60s, the practice of Samizdat, which translates to “self-publishing,” allowed circulation of the works of dissident authors such as Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — writers who raised consciousness about the existence of the gulag and repression of religion.

So seriously did the Soviet Union take the threat of anonymous dissent that it required the licensing of typewriters, with the KGB retaining data on the individual typefaces of each machine so that anyone retyping works of protest could be tracked down and punished.

China, no fan of political dissent, currently requires internet users to register with local police departments, and the government frequently compels internet service providers to turn over the physical locations (generally easily traceable) of computer users who post messages of protest.

Without question, these modern incarnations of anonymous mass communication have propelled liberation in many parts of the world. Recent manifestations include nascent democracy in Myanmar/Burma, greater international awareness of human rights in China, and the domino effect of Arab Spring revolutions.

At the same time, anonymity has an ethical dark side.

It frees the commenter from responsibility for the comment both in terms of truth and motive. Anonymity on the internet produces the same freedom to harass as the telephone once offered the crank-caller in the days before caller ID. But now the scale of the potential damage is magnified far beyond the one-on-one trauma of heavy breathing or requests to check if one’s refrigerator is running.

Anonymous harassment, as well as harassment committed under a false identity, have become a modern technological scourge — bullying on digital steroids.

And anonymous postings on news organizations’ websites — once lauded as conduits for tips and expression that could revive the grand tradition of the Revolutionary pamphleteers — have become both a nuisance and a nightmare for the news industry.

Publications increasingly are banning the practice altogether, not only in response to the worthless vile and inane dreck that’s disgorged, but also because anonymous comments are used as tools for propaganda, spam, self-promotion, and vilification of political or ideological opponents. They also put the publications in legal jeopardy from lawsuits and subpoenas from those who feel they have been defamed and demand the identity of the poster.

Some news sites now require users to register with a traceable name, even though they may post anonymously. Others have developed tiered systems where those who attach names to their comments receive more prominent placement. Others have dumped the anonymous comment box altogether.

Still, isn’t there an advantage — even an obligation — for the online world to offer an outlet for comments that might damage the reputation of a business (or government) but expose wrongdoing? For ideas that buck conventional wisdom, the collective systems of belief that far too often are based on prejudice, intolerance, and the desire to retain power? For leaked information that a government may wall off as a threat to national security when it is simply inconvenient or embarrassing to the powers that be?

Where should society set the ethical boundaries of anonymity?

Actually, I don’t know. But I’m intending to exploit one of the real benefits of online comment boxes and ask you to do my work for me.

What do you think are the ethical limits of anonymity? Please post. And — ahem — do note our comment-box policies.

©2012 Institute for Global Ethics

by Ethics Newsline editor Carl Hausman

by Ethics Newsline editor Carl Hausman

The “resignation letter heard round the world” continued to echo last week, as many in the business community and elsewhere shook their heads over the scathing piece in the New York Times in which former Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith pilloried what he called the “toxic” culture at the firm, blaming a lack of morality for his exit.

Details of the incident and the aftermath are included in this week’s Newsline run-down, but something that might benefit from a little expansion and exploration is the concept of a “toxic ethical culture.”

What is it, specifically, in the culture of an organization that makes ostensibly good people go bad?

There are those who probe such questions. Caveat: As a college professor, I read more research studies than I care to and know that studies, especially isolated polls and experiments, rarely “prove” anything and frequently are contradicted by subsequent research.

Having said that, inquiry into the roots of unethical behavior, along with some plain old eyeball research, does identify some conditions that can cause people to run off the ethics rails.

From what I can see, ethical cultures deteriorate when:

• We Rationalize. Doctors, one survey contends, are more likely to say it’s alright to accept a gift if the question is phrased in a way that mentions the sacrifice they’ve endured in their career — as opposed to a straightforward query about whether it is acceptable to take a gift. Another survey purported to show that people who believe they have acted with admirable ethics in one area may feel enabled to act unethically in another; the study indicated that those who applaud themselves for buying “green” products were more likely to rationalize bad behavior in other areas in a sort of “moral balancing.”

• We pay attention to only the “shalt nots,” not the “shalts.” It’s intoxicatingly easy to think that avoiding unethical actions is the same thing as acting ethically. But there are many deceptions and prevarications that come about by not doing something. For example, some critics argue that scientists tend not to publish data that does not suit their purposes. For example, a study showing a particular drug did not perform well in a clinical trial may simply not be written up. There’s no law that requires that every research project be submitted for publication. A fisherman with a six-inch-mesh net might conclude that all fish are bigger than six inches because he’ll never see the ones that got away. The same might be extrapolated for public knowledge about many aspects of science and technology if we only are shown what researchers want us to see. The same analogy can be applied to human behavior. Some researchers, for example, claim that anti-bullying programs are largely ineffective at best because they are simply a list of proscriptions, not affirmative training in how we shall treat each other.

• We confuse ethics with rules. Generally something is either against the rules or it isn’t. When we reify ethical behavior as something that isn’t specifically prohibited, the meaning is perverted. As Rushworth Kidder often noted, among the better definitions of ethics are “obedience to the unenforceable” and “what you do when no one is looking.” Note that some of the first dominoes in the global economic crisis fell because of actions that were reckless and irresponsible but not specifically illegal, probably because no one had thought to write a rule against such doltish behavior. A side-effect of the “ethics equal rules” syndrome is that the existence of a “code” is interpreted as self-justification of the ethical behavior of the organization. Enron, it might be noted, is said to have had an ethics code totaling 64 pages.

• We feel superior or privileged. This is a fairly obvious one: Some people clearly believe that standards of behavior apply only to the little people. And while it’s easy to read too much into this, two interesting recent studies purport to show that rich people tend to be ruder drivers and that people who identify themselves as upper-class tend to lie and cheat because they see selfish and greedy behavior as socially acceptable.

• Authority figures sanction our actions. This tendency was demonstrated graphically by the studies conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s. Milgram found that ordinary people could be prompted to deliver what they were led to believe were agonizing electrical shocks to an experimental subject when ordered to do so by a stern and authoritative professor. In 2010, a controversial French television show basically created the same scenario, finding that people were disturbingly compliant when hounded by an authority figure and led to believe they were giving shocks to participants on a television game show.

I’m sure there are many other contributors to a toxic ethical culture; this list is clearly not exhaustive. I’d like to continue this collection but would be grateful if you’d help me do the compiling! Please use the comment area below to explore the question, What are other reasons that cause ethical cultures to go sour?

©2012 Institute for Global Ethics

by Ethics Newsline editor Carl Hausman

The hottest item on Google’s list of trending topics late last week was a report from a Philadelphia television station about a man who admitted he used a cell-phone jamming gizmo to block conversations of other riders on his bus.

He told reporters that his improvised (and, it should be noted, illegal) device puts a lid on loud talkers and rude behavior. He also admits taking the law into his own hands, but declares, “Quite frankly, I’m proud of it.”

The Philadelphia bus story was one of several recent items highlighting the fact that technology can be used to stifle as well as stimulate communication. Among the others:

• In Japan, researchers have developed an instrument that essentially stuns someone into silence by beaming the speaker’s words back at him a split-second later — a delay that short-circuits the brain’s auditory pathways and causes the person to stutter to a halt. The “speech jammer,” according to some reports, is seen as an ideal method to calm a noisy classroom or a roiling demonstration.

• In Washington, the Federal Communications Commission announced that it is seeking public input on the proper circumstances under which the government can cut off wireless service to protect the public. The inquiry comes after San Francisco transit authorities blocked cell and internet access in some stations last August in order to quell expected organized protests.

• In London, police have considered asking Parliament for laws that would shut down Twitter feeds in the event that authorities discover that the microblogging service is being used to form crowds and foment a riot.

• In China, there’s been a crackdown on sales of software that is designed to circumvent the government’s content filters on the internet — filters that routinely excise material related to democracy and protest. Some speculate that that the move is motivated by the government’s fears of an Arab Spring-type political movement fueled by social media.

These developments represent a new twist to a very old ethical problem: the balance between the rights of the individual to expression and the presumed good of the majority to enjoy safety and security.

The Gutenberg press, for example, stirred up all sorts of draconian licensing laws when it became apparent that the machine could interfere with public order by inciting dissent. Several centuries later, pamphleteers found themselves in the government’s crosshairs in the early days of World War I, when someone advocating a munitions strike was charged with endangering troops abroad.

It was that case, in fact, that prompted U.S. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes to reason that the right to expression stopped at the point where words became weapons, such as falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater. The intent of such words was to harm, not to inform or express, reasoned Holmes, thus placing them out of the reach of First Amendment protections.

You could argue, and I might agree, that the issue of when it is right to ban communication is more salient than ever because the technology that we expect to enable communication can more effectively inhibit it as well.

For example, pamphleteers throughout history have been highly successful agitators because it is so difficult to root out every single printing press. Radio has for many years been an efficient medium for propaganda and counter-propaganda because portable sets were so common and radio frequencies so diverse that it was impossible to jam them all.

But electronic networks (and neural pathways, apparently) are quite vulnerable to certain types of throttling. Select portions of the United States’ internet backbone could, in fact, be shut down with a single switch.

Sound farfetched? I’m no technical expert, but presumably the U.S. government is, and there is currently a proposal regaining momentum in Congress to provide the president with a “kill switch” for various sectors of the internet.

The Lieberman/Collins/Rockefeller/Feinstein cybersecurity bill appears to be on the fast track for a vote by the full Senate. The measure’s stated purpose is to protect the U.S. banking systems from cyber-attack and to prevent cyber-terrorists from taking control of critical structures such as dams and power plants. Various civil libertarians, however, worry that such kill switch measures could be used to inhibit free speech and other liberties.

How far should the government ethically and legally be able to go in order to prevent insurrection and danger to the common good? Should it be permissible to cut cell-phone communications to short-circuit a riot? Should the president have a kill switch for the internet in the event of a cyber-attack?

I don’t have the answer, but you might. Please post your comments.

by Ethics Newsline editor Carl Hausman

I began my association with Rushworth Kidder about 20 years ago. As an ex-pat from New York City, I was delighted to start work in idyllic Camden, Maine, where Rush had set up shop in a warren of cluttered offices furnished with dented metal desks.

The small staff — I think it was four or five people then — would sit with Rush for hours and bat around ideas like cat toys. Through this process, he developed many creative approaches and innovations that became part of the foundation of the Institute’s work.

Interestingly, the assumptions that Rush posited in the early days have proved not only durable but prescient. They are astonishingly more salient today than they were two decades ago. They also have undoubtedly gained a greater measure of public acceptance.

Rush would have been the first to caution that that a statistical linkage does not necessarily translate to causation, but I’m sure the Institute played some role in raising awareness of the ideas that have become more or less mainstream today.

Among them:

• Ethics and rules are not synonymous. In the early days, we battled the assumption that dealing with ethical issues was simply a matter of drawing up a detailed code or set of regulations that would enforce good behavior. That view fell out of favor for many reasons, but right atop the list is the global financial crisis that metastasized after a glut of greed propelled by transactions that — while reckless — were often within the boundaries of the law.
• Technology leverages the damage made possible by unethical behavior. Rush’s earliest example of this principle coalesced when he became one of the first Western journalists to cover the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. The tragedy was, Rush discovered, not only a technical meltdown but also a moral one: Irresponsible workers had overridden alarms and intentionally jammed safety devices in order to complete an ill-advised set of tests as quickly as possible. The point he made at the time was that a handful of amoral people in charge of a powerful technological device could create disaster unparalleled in simpler times. The message didn’t always hit home among the unimaginative because nuclear reactors were not household items. But today, computers and internet access are, and the pages of Newsline are replete with examples of how digital technology magnifies the threats posed by someone who intends to bully, defame, or inflame.
• There are global constants in ethics. In the early 1990s, we often would encounter critics who were generally well-meaning but baffled by the contention that there could be universal ethical norms. “It’s all relative,” some said. But research and a growing body of empirical evidence — observable in each day’s news — show otherwise. For two decades, Institute publications, first in print and then online, have focused on how corruption corrodes the welds of confidence necessary to bond commerce and community — in Illinois, India, and everywhere in between. Stories we’ve carried also have documented universal reverence for equity, human rights, privacy, respect for the environment, and fundamental dignity. The names and the datelines are different and those attributes are clearly valued in different proportions by whatever government or cultural institution happens to be in power, but it’s clear that globalization applies also to ethics.
• Ethical reasoning can be learned. Ethics seminars were not unheard of before the Institute began offering them, but Rush changed the modus operandi. Instead of lists of prohibitions, instead of lectures intended to somehow browbeat “reform” into the listener — strategies that generally have a dismal rate of success — Rush showed how ethical behavior can arise from an organic series of decisions balancing attributes such as justice versus mercy or the rights of the individual versus the good of society. He developed a system that teaches not a series of dictates and recipes, but skills necessary to adapt, improvise, and nimbly navigate the ethical obstacle course of everyday life.

These are just a few of the many facets of Rush Kidder’s legacy, of course, and in the space of this column there’s not room for much more. But to paraphrase an old newsroom saying, at least it was brief and we got our facts straight. Rush would have liked it that way.

by Ethics Newsline editor Carl Hausman

I began my association with Rushworth Kidder about 20 years ago. As an ex-pat from New York City, I was delighted to start work in idyllic Camden, Maine, where Rush had set up shop in a warren of cluttered offices furnished with dented metal desks.
The small staff — I think it was four or five people then — would sit with Rush for hours and bat around ideas like cat toys. Through this process, he developed many creative approaches and innovations that became part of the foundation of the Institute’s work.
Interestingly, the assumptions that Rush posited in the early days have proved not only durable but prescient. They are astonishingly more salient today than they were two decades ago. They also have undoubtedly gained a greater measure of public acceptance.
Rush would have been the first to caution that that a statistical linkage does not necessarily translate to causation, but I’m sure the Institute played some role in raising awareness of the ideas that have become more or less mainstream today.
Among them:
· Ethics and rules are not synonymous. In the early days, we battled the assumption that dealing with ethical issues was simply a matter of drawing up a detailed code or set of regulations that would enforce good behavior. That view fell out of favor for many reasons, but right atop the list is the global financial crisis that metastasized after a glut of greed propelled by transactions that — while reckless — were often within the boundaries of the law.
· Technology leverages the damage made possible by unethical behavior. Rush’s earliest example of this principle coalesced when he became one of the first Western journalists to cover the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. The tragedy was, Rush discovered, not only a technical meltdown but also a moral one: Irresponsible workers had overridden alarms and intentionally jammed safety devices in order to complete an ill-advised set of tests as quickly as possible. The point he made at the time was that a handful of amoral people in charge of a powerful technological device could create disaster unparalleled in simpler times. The message didn’t always hit home among the unimaginative because nuclear reactors were not household items. But today, computers and internet access are, and the pages of Newsline are replete with examples of how digital technology magnifies the threats posed by someone who intends to bully, defame, or inflame.
· There are global constants in ethics. In the early 1990s, we often would encounter critics who were generally well-meaning but baffled by the contention that there could be universal ethical norms. “It’s all relative,” some said. But research and a growing body of empirical evidence — observable in each day’s news — show otherwise. For two decades, Institute publications, first in print and then online, have focused on how corruption corrodes the welds of confidence necessary to bond commerce and community — in Illinois, India, and everywhere in between. Stories we’ve carried also have documented universal reverence for equity, human rights, privacy, respect for the environment, and fundamental dignity. The names and the datelines are different and those attributes are clearly valued in different proportions by whatever government or cultural institution happens to be in power, but it’s clear that globalization applies also to ethics.
· Ethical reasoning can be learned. Ethics seminars were not unheard of before the Institute began offering them, but Rush changed the modus operandi. Instead of lists of prohibitions, instead of lectures intended to somehow browbeat “reform” into the listener — strategies that generally have a dismal rate of success — Rush showed how ethical behavior can arise from an organic series of decisions balancing attributes such as justice versus mercy or the rights of the individual versus the good of society. He developed a system that teaches not a series of dictates and recipes, but skills necessary to adapt, improvise, and nimbly navigate the ethical obstacle course of everyday life.
These are just a few of the many facets of Rush Kidder’s legacy, of course, and in the space of this column there’s not room for much more. But to paraphrase an old newsroom saying, at least it was brief and we got our facts straight. Rush would have liked it that way.
©2012 Institute for Global Ethics

 

©2012 Institute for Global Ethics

by Ethics Newsline editor Carl Hausman

As Facebook readies itself to become a publicly traded corporation, it faces the prospect of unrelenting pressure to turn a quarterly profit. At the same time, it confronts close scrutiny from privacy groups and politicians over how it uses the massive troves of data that it collects from its 845 million users, as the New York Times reports this week.

Google, which already has gone public, is facing a backlash over its plans to combine data from its various services in order to wring more money out of user information. Essentially, Google wants to begin merging information from its search engine, YouTube views, and keywords identified in email to create more specific and profitable profiles. Attorneys general from a number of states have taken issue with this plan, and many privacy watchdog groups are crying foul.

From an ethical point of view, these types of privacy dilemmas are interesting because the issues created by advancing technology usually aren’t centered so much on the invasion of privacy per se but rather on the “repurposing” of information.

Most of us are willing, for example, to post that we “like” a particular product or service. But it has raised eyebrows — and some hackles — when that “like” information is not only used to steer appropriate ads our way but used in advertising, with our “like” nod of approval and our photograph inserted into an ad that is circulated to our virtual “friends.”

Repurposed information always made us a little uneasy, even before the widespread availability of computer databases. When I volunteered at a museum in the early 1980s, I was surprised to learn that the museum sold its member list to companies that were advertising products that, for whatever reason, were deemed to be attractive to museum members. (I learned this from an angry member who had deduced the source of some unwanted sales calls.) The museum also sold its list to other museums, apparently because a member of one is more likely to be sold on a membership to another.

The member’s complaint, I thought, was valid. Paraphrased: I joined a museum. I didn’t sign up to have my name and address sold to salespeople. I do, though, remember a verbatim quote from his harangue: “I want to deal with people I can trust.”

As my full-time job was, and has always been, journalism, I repurposed that complaint into articles, books, and presentations that became something of a cottage industry about information ethics. It’s a durable field because the advent of the personal computer and readily available programs to mix and match data reliably generates controversy.

In the 1990s, when computers and database software went mainstream, I began to see how repurposed information could be put to unexpectedly sinister uses. For example, an enterprising database programmer discovered that he easily could collect public-domain data on anyone who had ever sued a landlord. And for a fee — paid by a landlord — he would search his database and see if a prospective tenant was on it. While some landlords might have appreciated the repurposed information, it should be noted that there was no mention of the disposition of the suits or if they were justified.

A decade or so later, the techniques became a little more cringe inducing. Databases were established that identified people who had filed malpractice suits; these databases were intended to be used by doctors to screen prospective patients. While this may have had minimal impact on people living in urban areas, it had the potential to create considerable hardship for, say, women who lived in rural areas who needed an obstetrician.

Both practices eventually were declared illegal, at least in the states where the incidents achieved their first notoriety, but it took many years for the law to catch up to the technology.

The lag between abuse and judicial remedy can be long and even indefinite. We still don’t have definitive case law on conundrums such as:

• How your EZPass data can be used to monitor your movements
• The extent to which your driver’s license can be used as an instrument of social control (denying renewal of a driver’s license to someone who owes child support or library fines, for example)
• If and how your movements, as tracked by a GPS in your smartphone, can be used in advertising to attract you to the coffee shop a block away

Today, the level of unease about privacy has reached a level unequalled in the three decades or so that I’ve been covering the issue. Regulation could be accelerated and it could be heavy-handed, making it a double-edged weapon. As much as I cherish my privacy, I also like the power of my Gmail account, the stream of news tailored to my personal surfing habits, the facility to compensate for having a terrible sense of direction by seeing my destination on Google Street View, and the ability to reconnect with 240 high school Facebook “friends,” which is probably about twice the number of physical friends I actually had back then.

It may not even require legislation to tamp down the positive aspects of new media. Consumers may even vote with their feet soon, fleeing from a cyberspace Wild West where they fear ambush from beyond the next hill.

Why could regulation and public disapproval stanch our electronic lifelines? There are two reasons. One is obvious: People are worried about repurposed and recombined data stripping their privacy and being fused into a fissionable mass of deeply personal information that turns their private lives into public commodities.

But the other and perhaps larger reason is a question of ethics: Companies trading in personal information, particularly Facebook, have subscribed for too long to the old maxim that it’s easier to apologize than to ask permission. Virtually every week we see stories (many of them covered in Newsline) about major online firms that have been forced, usually under the threat of legislation, legal action, or consumer outrage) to back away from some subterranean overreaching centered on user information.

So while I hope I don’t have my electronic tentacles cut by regulation and while I hope that I don’t have to seriously consider cutting back or ending altogether my activities on various Google services or in social media, either is a possibility.

I just want to deal with people I can trust.