Imagine you’re a huge baseball fan scoring an all-access pass to Major League Baseball’s All-Star game. You are now suddenly surrounded by the game’s current and former premier players. Your answers to lifelong questions about the game are now just feet away. Yes, you can finally buttonhole baseball’s commissioner about whether he plans to abolish the infield fly rule, or ask a pitcher about the mechanics involved in throwing a 100 mile per hour pitch.  

Privacy in the Modern Age: the Search for Solutions is your all-access pass to 24 of privacy’s brightest minds: Steven Aftergood; Ross Anderson; Christine L. Borgman; Ryan Calo; Danielle Citron; Simon Davies; A. Michael Froomkin; Deborah Hurley; Kristina Irion; Jeff Jones; Harry Lewis; Anna Lysyanskaya; Gary T. Marx; Aleecia M. McDonald; Pablo G. Molina; Peter G. Neumann; Helen Nissenbaum; Frank Pasquale; Deborah Peel, Stephanie E. Perrin; Marc Rotenberg; Pamela Samuelson; Bruce Schneier, and Christopher Wolf. 

This privacy anthology — edited by the Electronic Privacy Information Center — examines current and future privacy challenges facing individuals, companies, and governments. These 24 thought-provoking essays touch on a variety of challenges and proposed solutions  in areas including surveillance, cryptography, anonymity, health privacy, big data, and copyright and privacy. The reader is presented with a wealth of broad and granular perspectives that will interest and inspire both those steeped in privacy, as well as consumers who might not fully understand the journey their consensual and non-consensual personal information takes. 

Ryan Calo provides a glimpse into a dystopian future where robots replace drug-sniffing dogs, while predicting the courts will apply Supreme Court precedent requiring probable cause to bring a drug-sniffing dog onto a person’s property (Florida v. Jardines). “Imagine if a drone or driverless car circulated throughout a city, mindful of property lines, and autonomously searched homes and people for signs of drugs or weapons. Imagine further that the robot only alerted police when it detected contraband with sufficient certainty, immediately deleting any image it did not need as evidence so that no human would ever see it," Calo writes.  

In an interesting perspective, Pamela Samuelson considers whether copyright law sometimes does a better job of protecting privacy than privacy law. In one example, Samuelson compares a photographer’s film of the private wedding between Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett, which was seized by the venue hosting the wedding (yes, there used to be film in cameras). The court ruled that the newsworthiness of the pictures trumped the couple’s privacy interests (Time v. Sand Creek Partners LLP). While in another very similar case – Monge v, Maya Magazines Inc. – the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals protected the privacy interests of a singer who sued a magazine for copyright infringement after it published pictures of her secret marriage to her manager. The magazine, according to the court, could have revealed the marriage by gleaning information from the marriage certificate without publishing the private photos.

According to Jeff Jonas, surveillance is both good and bad. Illegal surveillance or that done without consumer consent is obviously bad, but as the Internet of Things grows so will “valuable products and services (e.g., monitoring an independently living elderly person for life safety: they are now in bed for the night but have left the stove on!).”  In order to address this increased use of pooled data, Jonas points to the benefits of using tamper-resistant or “immutable audit logs” — audit logging systems that cannot be altered. For instance, a data administrator who searches a law enforcement database for someone’s ex-wife is not able to hide those digital footprints from auditors. 

Privacy’s survival in a world of big data is possible with a re-evaluation of the Fair Information Practice Principles, according to Christopher Wolf in a decidedly optimistic take — “[t]he prospects are good that thoughtful and concerned people will develop needed solutions with greater attention being paid to preserving privacy in our modern society.”

This book deserves to occupy some real estate on the nightstands of those concerned about privacy’s vitality in the future.