Tag: Anonymity

Photograph of a doctor in blue scrubs overlaid with an illustration of a padlock

Anonymity in the Time of a Pandemic: Privacy vs. Transparency

Cansu Canca Leave a comment

By Cansu Canca

As coronavirus cases increase worldwide, institutions keep their communities informed with frequent updates—but only up to a point. They share minimal information such as number of cases, but omit the names of individuals and identifying information.

Many institutions are legally obligated to protect individual privacy, but is this prohibition of transparency ethically justified?

Some even go a step further and ask you, an individual in a community, to choose privacy over transparency as well. Harvard—alongside with  Yale, Chicago, and Northwestern—requests you to “Please Respect Individuals’ Privacy. Anonymity for these individuals remains paramount. Please respect their privacy—even if you believe you know who they are—so they can focus completely on their health” (emphasis in original).

But do you have an ethical obligation to do so at the time of a pandemic?

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Anonymity is Not Privacy (and Why it Matters)

jskopek 1 Comment

Anonymity is not just an aspect of privacy and recognizing their difference reveals a powerful and poorly understood set of legal tools for facilitating and controlling the production of public goods.  This is the central claim of my newest article (SSRN draft available here).

Three examples illustrate the scope of the under-explored ways in which anonymity is currently used in our law.

  • The first is from June 1997, when many residents in the Boston neighborhood of Allston learned to their anger that Harvard University had spent the previous 8 years secretly acquiring over 50 acres of Allston real estate.  It did so using buying agents, which can generally protect their principal’s anonymity—even by falsely stating that they are not agents.
  • The second is from Election Day 2012, when many voters who had shared photos of their completed ballots on Facebook and Twitter learned, to their surprise, that they had violated their states’ elections laws in doing so.   They did not know that anonymity in voting was not just a right, but also a requirement.
  • The third is from a 2006 lawsuit over the control of thousands of tissue samples being used in research at Washington University.  When many of the research participants sought to withdraw their tissue from future research, in response to what they saw as a breach of their consent, they were shocked to learn that the university could refuse and extinguish their rights of withdrawal by anonymizing their tissue samples.

These varied uses of anonymity in our law—as a right when purchasing land, a requirement in voting, and a trigger than extinguishes rights in biomedical research—may appear to be unrelated.  But I argue that they are in fact all part of a cohesive and previously unrecognized class of rules that use anonymity not to protect privacy, but rather to incentivize or control the production and circulation of information and other socially desirable goods. Read More