Judge Richard Posner: Privacy | Richard Posner | Big Think

Judge Richard Posner: Privacy

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Judge Posner believes that as a social good, privacy is overrated because it means people are able to conceal things.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Richard Posner:

Richard Posner is an influential legal theorist and author and currently a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Posner attended Yale as an undergraduate, and was first in his class at Harvard Law School. Following his graduation from Harvard, Posner clerked for Justice William J. Brennan Jr.; he later worked as assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States. In 1969, Posner began teaching at the University of Chicago Law School, where he remains a Senior Lecturer to this day. In 1981, Posner was appointed to Seventh Circuit's Court of Appeals. Posner helped found the law and economics movement, which argues that the primary goal of law should be outcomes that are economically sensible and efficient rather than "just." Known for his eclectic mix of beliefs, Posner can't be pigeonholed as a liberal or a conservative: he has written that marijuana should be legalized and also that there are times when "torture should be used." Posner was the founding editor of the Journal of Legal Studies and (with Orley Ashenfelter) the American Law and Economics Review. Posner is the author of dozens of books, including Public Intellectuals, and The Problems of Jurisprudence, and How Judges Think, which was published in April 2008. His next book A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression will be released May 2009.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Will there be a notion of privacy in the future?Richard Posner: No. I value my privacy as much as anyone. But I think as a social good, a social aspect, I think privacy is greatly overrated because privacy basically means concealment. People conceal things in order to fool other people about them. They want to appear healthier than they are, smarter, more honest and so forth. I mean I’m exaggerating some, but I think it’s very much a double-edged sword, from a social standpoint. That’s number one.

Number two, privacy is not one of those things that’s deeply ingrained in human nature. I think it’s very culturally specific. Obviously early man, early people had no privacy. They couldn’t afford it. It’s what economists call a superior good. The demand for it rises as people become wealthier because it has this instrumental value. You do want to control information about yourself. That will enable you to make advantageous transactions personally, professionally, and commercially with other people. But so as I said I don’t think it’s deeply ingrained in us. I think it’s culturally specific. And probably because it isn’t deeply ingrained, it turns out that people obviously, as I say, attach some value to privacy because it is nice to be able to conceal the bad things about yourself. But they don’t attach a lot of value to it, and that’s indicated by the behavior, the way we surrender our privacy for really small gains.

Like if you deal online, you reveal enormous information to the vendors. And then they exchange it among themselves. If the government wants it from them, they can get it easily. So with one click purchasing from Amazon, what that means is that you give Amazon all the information about your reading habits, and then they create a profile of you. So they just wanna sell you books. They’re not snooping; but they use this information to create a profile. So they’re basically creating a political or cultural profile of you. People turn out to be willing to surrender privacy for quite modest gains, like the convenience of one-click ordering.

Also, for example, medical records are increasingly being digitized. Well once they’re digitized, once something is digitized, it’s out there. Your privacy is lost. I’m not sure everybody realizes this, but digitized materials tend to serve, tend to be in sort of multiple copies on different servers and so forth.

But on the other hand, it’s a great convenience to have your medical records digitized. That's the inexorable trend – all your medical information, it won’t be completely public, but it will be accessible in a way that handwritten doctors’ notes are . . . are not.

And similarly with EZ Pass, your movements are recorded permanently.

Read the full transcript at