Authors@Google: Daniel Solove

Daniel J. Solove, an associate professor of law at the George Washington University Law School visits Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss his book "The Future of Reputation."

What information about you is available on the Internet? What if it's wrong, humiliating, or true but regrettable? Will it ever go away? Teeming with chatrooms, online discussion groups, and blogs, the Internet offers previously unimagined opportunities for personal expression and communication. But there's a dark side to the story. A trail of information fragments about us is forever preserved on the Internet, instantly available in a Google search. A permanent chronicle of our private lives—often of dubious reliability and sometimes totally false—will follow us wherever we go, accessible to friends, strangers, dates, employers, neighbors, relatives, and anyone else who cares to look. This engrossing book, brimming with amazing examples of gossip, slander, and rumor on the Internet, explores the profound implications of the online collision between free speech and privacy.

Daniel Solove, an authority on information privacy law, offers a fascinating account of how the Internet is transforming gossip, the way we shame others, and our ability to protect our own reputations. Focusing on blogs, Internet communities, cyber mobs, and other current trends, he shows that, ironically, the unconstrained flow of information on the Internet may impede opportunities for self-development and freedom. Longstanding notions of privacy need review, the author contends: unless we establish a balance among privacy, free speech, and anonymity, we may discover that the freedom of the Internet makes us less free.

The Future of Reputation is now available free online at Daniel Solove's website http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2008/02/the_future_of_r_3.html

This event took place on February 11, 2008, and was jointly sponsored by Google's public policy team and Authors@Google.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• reputation
• privacy
• law
• internet