Digital Images for the Information Professional,by Melissa M. Terras. Burlington,VT: Ashgate, 2008. 245 pp. $114.95 cloth. ISBN 978-0-7546-4860-4 (cloth)

Privacy has largely been equated with every individual's right to privacy. Accordingly, current efforts to protect privacy on the Internet have sought anonymity by breaking, where possible, links with personally identifiable information (PII)—all uses of aggregated data stripped of PII are considered legitimate. This article argues that we need to use a broader concept, general or group identifying information (GII), because even aggregated data stripped of PII violate privacy at the community level. The search engine companies, or anyone else with access to their log files, can use these data to generate a moment-by-moment view of what is on the collective mind. Such a view can be used in a variety of ways, some with deep economic and even political impact. In order to frame this discussion, it is necessary to examine some of the realities of the search engine-mediated associative interface to the World Wide Web. While this interface has enormous benefits for the networked world, it also fundamentally changes a number of issues underlying various current debates about Internet governance.     

MP3: The Meaning of a Format,by Jonathan Sterne. Durham,NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 360 pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN 0822352877 (paper).

Along with informed consent, anonymization is an accepted method of protecting the interests of research participants, while allowing data collected for official statistical purposes to be reused by other agencies within and outside government. The Decennial Census, carried out in a number of countries, including the United Kingdom, is a major event in the production of research data and provides an important resource for a variety of organizations. This article combines ethical evaluation, a review of relevant law and guidance, and analysis of 30 qualitative interviews (carried out during the period of the 2001 UK Census), in order to explore the adequacy of the current framework for the protection of informational privacy in relation to census data. Taking account of Nissenbaum's concept of “contextual integrity,” Vedder's concept of “categorical privacy,” and Sen's call to heed of the importance of “actual behavior,” it will be argued that the current “contractarian” view of the relationship between an individual participant and the organization carrying out the Census does not engage sufficiently with actual uses of data. As a result, people have expectations of privacy that are not matched by practice and that the current normative—including the governance—framework cannot capture.     

Telecommunications and Economic Development by Robert J. Saunders,Jeremy J. Warford and Bjorn Wellenius, (Johns Hopkins University Press for the World Bank,Baltimore, 1983) pp. 395, $US32.50 (hb), $14.95 (pb), ISBN: 0-801-82828-7 (hb), 0-801-82829-3 (pb)

The economic justification for government support for science and technology has been commonly based on the concept of market failure. The general theoretical argument is that governments should intervene in cases where the free market fails to achieve an efficient allocation of resources. In this paper, the inadequacies of the concepts of market failure as they apply to policy are outlined. Its use in the political process, given these restrictive shortcomings, is also considered. Examples are drawn from Australian experience in science and technology policy over the past few years to support the claim that the concept is neither a sufficient basis nor an adequate guide for government intervention. Rather it has been used to justify politically determined decisions. Special reference is made to the Australian Industrial Research and Development Incentives Scheme.