An Introduction to Privacy in Economics and Politics
An Introduction to Privacy in Economics and Politics
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经济和政治中的隐私简介
DOI：
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发表时间：
1980
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
G. Stigler
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
G. Stigler
在我们的社会中，人们对隐私的兴趣急剧增加，这在公共媒体和法规中都是显而易见的。在某些方面，这种对隐私的兴趣是自相矛盾的，因为普通公民比以往任何时候都有更多的隐私——他的生活中有更多的领域他的行为不为他的同伴所知。他住在大城市，在那里无人看守；在过去的小城镇里，只有最聪明的人才能赢得隐私。他在大型机构工作，事实上，他（或者更有可能是某个自封的发言人）对自己的疏离感到惋惜。他只要搬到南方或西方，就能摆脱过去的大部分记忆。除了第一次世界大战前的移民浪潮外，没有更早的一代人像他这样流动。如果隐私问题是一个真正的问题，而不是那些一时占据头条的人为问题之一，那么它的存在可能是因为政府的巨大增长。各级政府现在正在收集历史上前所未有的数量和个人细节的信息。考虑:1860年，如果不离开华盛顿特区，一个政府官员是不可能了解随便挑选的一个公民的收入情况的。今天，社会保障局、国税局、证券交易委员会的档案、银行交易的缩微胶卷和其他来源都有可能回答这个问题。更不用说，也许三四个家庭中就有一个家庭直接或间接地从联邦政府获得补贴。此外，政府已成为控制公民个人信息收集和信息使用行为的主要工具。技术极大地改变了收集和传播信息的机制，但指导这一机制使用的是政治和经济。在这个大课题中，我们探讨了三个主题：经济行为中隐私的本质；的经济影响
THE enormous increase in interest in privacy in our society is evident in the public press and in the statute books. In some respects this interest in privacy is paradoxical, for the average citizen has more privacy-more areas of his life in which his behavior is not known by his fellows-than ever before. He lives in a large city, where no one is his keeper; in the small towns of former times privacy was won only by the cleverest people. He works in large organizations, and indeed he (or, more likely, some self-appointed spokesman) laments his alienation. He can shake off most of his past simply by moving-to the South, the West-and no earlier generation except the immigrant waves before World War I was as mobile. If then the privacy issue is a real issue, and not one of those contrived issues that march across the headlines for a time, it probably exists because of the vast growth of government. Governments (at all levels) are now collecting information of a quantity and in a personal detail unknown in history. Consider: it would have been quite impossible for a public official in 1860 to learn anything of the income of a citizen chosen at random without leaving Washington, D.C. Today the files of Social Security, the Internal Revenue Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the microfilms of banking transactions, and other sources are potentially available to answer the question, to say nothing of the fact that perhaps one family in three or four receives payments directly or indirectly from the federal government. In addition the government has become the major instrument by which the information-collecting and information-using practices of private citizens are controlled. Technology has enormously changed the mechanics of gathering and disseminating information, but it is politics and economics that direct the uses of the machinery. Three topics in this large subject are explored here: the nature of privacy in economic behavior; the economic effects of