What is the appropriate balance between privacy, security, and accountability? What do we owe each other in terms of information sharing and access? Why is privacy valuable and is it more or less important than other values like security or free speech? Is Edward Snowden a hero or villain? Within democratic societies, privacy, security, and accountability are seen as important values that must be balanced appropriately. If there is too much privacy, then there may be too little accountability - and more alarmingly, too little security. On the other hand, where there is too little privacy, individuals may not have the space to grow, experiment, and engage in practices not generally accepted by the majority. Moreover, allowing overly limited control over access to and uses of private places and information may itself be a threat to security. By clarifying the moral, legal, and social foundations of privacy, security, and accountability, this book helps determine the appropriate balance between these contested values. Twelve specially commissioned essays provide the ideal resource for students and academics in information and applied ethics.

What is the appropriate balance between privacy, security, and accountability? What do we owe each other in terms of information sharing and access? Why is privacy valuable and is it more or less important than other values like security or free speech? Is Edward Snowden a hero or villain? Within democratic societies, privacy, security, and accountability are seen as important values that must be balanced appropriately. If there is too much privacy, then there may be too little accountability - and more alarmingly, too little security. On the other hand, where there is too little privacy, individuals may not have the space to grow, experiment, and engage in practices not generally accepted by the majority. Moreover, allowing overly limited control over access to and uses of private places and information may itself be a threat to security. By clarifying the moral, legal, and social foundations of privacy, security, and accountability, this book helps determine the appropriate balance between these contested values. Twelve specially commissioned essays provide the ideal resource for students and academics in information and applied ethics.

Computer technology and the proliferation of digital networks have radically altered how ideas and information are gathered and manipulated and generated new conflicts between public use and private rights. These conflicts raise serious problems: Are abstract ideas and information proper subjects of ownership? What role should privacy rights play? How does the violation of intellectual property rights compare morally to the violation of physical property rights? Now available in paperback, "Intellectual Property and Information Control" provides answers and strategies for dealing with these and other questions while mounting a philosophical defense of rights to intellectual and intangible property. As the book shows, a policy that allows too much access may stymie innovation and cause individuals to isolate themselves. At the other extreme, huge, multinational corporations may hold as intangible property vast amounts of knowledge, including sensitive personal information. Through discussions of patent law, fair use, and practical problems such as privacy in the workplace, Moore demonstrates that intellectual and intangible property rights exist along with privacy rights. The latter will sometimes constrain what can be done with the former.

We all know that Google stores huge amounts of information about everyone who uses its search tools, that Amazon can recommend new books to us based on our past purchases, and that the U.S. government engaged in many data-mining activities during the Bush administration to acquire information about us, including involving telecommunications companies in monitoring our phone calls (currently the subject of a bill in Congress). Control over access to our bodies and to special places, like our homes, has traditionally been the focus of concerns about privacy, but access to information about us is raising new challenges for those anxious to protect our privacy. In Privacy Rights, Adam Moore adds informational privacy to physical and spatial privacy as fundamental to developing a general theory of privacy that is well grounded morally and legally.