ABSTRACT
We began the last chapter by thinking of a person’s life as a line of dots representing events and coloring an event red if a business collected information about it. Now picture the collection of all these lines for every person in the country. Every one of the red dots represents a trade-off between protecting informational privacy and gaining the benefits of collecting and processing information. Imagine that every trade-off is governed by at least one value optimal informational norm. Then every trade-off would be a best justified one to which people would give free and informed consent. In short, individuals would have adequate informational privacy. This is the ideal that, in the last chapter, we labeled norm completeness. In this chapter, we analyze six examples in which norm completeness fails. It fails in two ways: Norms exist but are not value optimal and relevant norms do not exist at all. We first present three examples of existing norms that lack value optimality: direct marketing, information aggregators, and the health insurance industry. We then present three examples of lack of norms: cookies, cloud computing, and social networks.
