The Information Society and Human Rights

In one line

When information became the thing that is produced, stored, moved and sold, every right that depends on what other people know about you changed its shape.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the information society is a society in which the generation, processing and transmission of information become the principal source of productivity and power, so that the ordinary conditions of life, work, government and association are mediated by information systems. Its arrival is a human rights event because rights that were previously limited by the cost of knowing are no longer limited at all: the practical protection a person once had from being watched, recorded, identified, ranked or silenced came from the expense and difficulty of doing those things, and that protection has gone.

Why the law has this at all

The whole of this book is built on the proposition stated in [What This Paper Is About]: a technology changes what is possible, and the law then has to decide a question it did not have to decide before. Module II showed it in medicine, one statute at a time. Module IV shows it in information, and the difference is one of scale.

Consider what protected privacy before the information society, and notice that none of it was law.

Records were on paper, so finding one was work. A file existed in one place, and consulting it meant going there. The cost of retrieval was itself a limit on how often anybody was looked up.

Records did not combine. A hospital knew what a hospital knew, an employer what an employer knew. Bringing two files together required somebody to decide to do it and then do it by hand.

Records decayed. Paper was lost, misfiled and destroyed, and a thing forgotten was, in practice, gone.

And speech reached as far as the speaker could be heard. A defamatory remark in a village stayed in the village; a pamphlet reached those who were handed one.

Every one of those limits was practical, not legal, and every one of them has been removed. Retrieval is instant, records combine by default, storage is cheaper than deletion, and a sentence typed by anyone can reach everyone. The law of privacy, of reputation, of speech and of equality was written against the background of those limits, and it now has to do without them.

That is the proposition Module IV works out, and it has two directions, exactly as [Dual Use: the Same Technology Both Ways] would predict. The same removal of cost that lets a State watch a population lets a citizen demand the State's records; the same reach that spreads a lie spreads the correction; the same identification system that excludes people from a ration shop is the thing that got them onto the list.