The privacy paradox: The privacy benefits of privacy threats

[Commentary] The domestic and international debate around privacy issues often overstates the negative impacts of new technologies relative to their privacy benefits, argue Benjamin Wittes and Jodie Liu in a new paper. Many new technologies -- whose privacy impacts we frequently fear as a society -- actually bring great privacy boons to users.

Wittes and Liu assert that society tends to reap the benefits of privacy without much thought while also tallying and wringing its hands about the costs. People have privacy today with respect to so many types of content, they observe, for instance in the areas of medical information, politically sensitive publications and purchases, erotic materials, and secret communications. And such privacy is the result of, paradoxically, a series of technologies, which are the subject of endless anxiety among commentators, scholars, journalists, and activists concerned about -- ironically enough -- protecting privacy in the digital age.

[Benjamin Wittes is a senior fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution. Jodie Liu is a JD Candidate at Harvard Law School]