Privacy Behavior

Description

Please answer the following questions on well made paragraphs, use all the handouts given. It it’s important to answer all the questions based on the handouts..  Exercise 1 1. Do the results of the studies conducted by John et al. show that individuals’ privacy behavior is irrational? If so, what is the best alternative explanation of the behavior and why do you think it does not succeed? If not, why not? Exercise 2 Acquisti et al. write: “The research reviewed here suggests that if the goal of policy is to adequately protect privacy (as we believe it should be), then we need policies that protect individuals with minimal requirement of informed and rational decisionmaking— policies that include a baseline framework of protection, such as the principles embedded in the so-called fair information practices (86). People need assistance and even protection to aid in navigating what is otherwise a very uneven playing field. As highlighted by our discussion, a goal of public policy should be to achieve a more even equity of power between individuals, consumers, and citizens on the one hand and, on the other, the data holders such as governments and corporations that currently have the upper hand. To be effective, privacy policy should protect real people—who are naïve, uncertain, and vulnerable—and should be sufficiently flexible to evolve with the emerging unpredictable complexities of the information age.” 1. What might Allen say about the argument in this passage? What might Solove say? Explain your answers by drawing on your knowledge of the two authors’ positions on privacy. 2. Do you agree that experimental work on privacy demonstrates that people are “naïve, uncertain, and vulnerable”? If so, how do you think privacy should be regulated? If not, why not? Exercise 3 Consider the following passage, in which Pettit discusses a possible objection to the idea that group agents can be morally responsible: “There are many ways in which an agent might not be autonomous… The salient, if not the only, way in which a group agent might fail to qualify as autonomous is through failing to be an agent that is distinct from the agents who are its members. It would fail to be autonomous in this manner, arguably, if the attitudes ascribed to it—if you like, the group mind—were just a function of the corresponding attitudes adopted by the members, whether independently or under some scheme of coordination.1 If the group attitudes were a function of the corresponding individual attitudes, then they would not be novel on any point or proposition; every judgment would reflect corresponding individual judgments, every preference, corresponding individual preferences, and so on…. Such a group might not be counted as an agent in its own right. There is a traditional view according to which all group agents are just second- class agents of this kind, not agents with any degree of novelty in the attitudes they embrace.” 1. If the “traditional view” Pettit describes is correct, which of the three conditions for moral responsibility (Value Relevance, Value Judgment, Value Sensitivity) would it call into question? Why? 2. What is Pettit’s argument against the “traditional view”? Explain it in your own words. Your explanation should make reference to the table at the top of page 182 of the reading.   *1 The word ‘attitude’ here refers to propositional attitudes like beliefs and desires. To say that the attitudes of a group are a function of the attitudes of its members is to say that the attitudes of the group’s members uniquely determine the attitude of the group via some “recipe”; for example, one might hold that a group has a belief just in case more than half of its members have that belief.