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information entrepreneurialism
``` I've attached the abstract and first couple pages of a draft chapter by Rob Kling, Mark S. Ackerman, and Jonathan P. Allen entitled "Information Entrepreneuralism, Information Technologies and the Continuing Vulnerability of Privacy". I was going to send the whole article, but it's 1000 lines and 50kbytes, even longer than the piece by May that I sent the other day. If you want to fetch the whole article, send a message that looks like this:
To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: archive send information
Administrative note: Mike Corrigan has overhauled the RRE software for the new year, so be on the lookout for strange behavior. Most likely, though, we'll be enjoying hassle-free service until the inevitable half-life of software rolls around again.
Happy new year.
Phil
Encl:
Date: Mon, 02 Jan 1995 16:48:16 -0800
From: Rob Kling
INFORMATION ENTREPRENEURALISM, INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES and the CONTINUING VULNERABILITY OF PRIVACY Rob Kling, Mark S. Ackerman, and Jonathan P. Allen December 27, 1994 (Draft 4.4) [6900 words]
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For: Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices. 2nd Ed: Rob Kling (Ed). Academic Press, 1995.
Copyright, 1994. Rob Kling.
Note: This article may be circulated for non-commercial purposes. Please contact the authors or compare it with the final published version before quoting directly.
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ABSTRACT
Why is there a continuing development of information technologies, applications, and uses that impinge on personal privacy? One explanation focuses upon the changing social conditions in which many modern organizations deal with large, mobile clienteles. Environmental factors such as social mobility and computer improvements, however, cannot completely explain the diverse ways that surveillance technology has been implemented across industries, or even in different organizations within a single industry.
In this paper, we link the adoption and use of new computer technologies for large-scale record keeping to a set of social practices we refer to as information entrepreneurialism. Our explanation focuses on the active attempts of coalitions within organizations to organize corporate production to take advantage of changes in information technology. Organizations have been transformed by the rise of professional managers, who have been trained in and rewarded for pursuing managerial strategies that depend upon data-intensive analysis techniques. This internal structure is an important institutional explanation of modern society's push to increase the monitoring of indirect social relationships. We illustrate these issues with examples of commercial uses of surveillance technology.
INTRODUCTION
Why is there a continuing development of information technologies, applications, and uses that impinge on personal privacy?
In the early 1990s Lotus Development Corporation announced plans to market a CD-based database of household marketing data, Marketplace:Household. Lotus Marketplace:Household would have given anyone with a relatively inexpensive Apple Macintosh access to personal data on more than 120 million Americans (Levy, 1991; Culnan, 1993).
Lotus Marketplace:Household is only one example of surveillance and monitoring technologies and products. Many similar cases can be found. In 1991, for example, the Metromail division of R.R. Donnelley obtained names from voter-registration lists to sell to direct mail campaigns, violating state laws (Wartzman, 1994). More recently, in 1994 the Orange County California sheriff's department constructed a text and photo database of possible gang members to help thwart a growing trend of ethnic gang violence. The database included many teenagers of Hispanic or Asian descent who had merely worn currently fashionable gang-like clothes to school.
Lotus withdrew Marketplace:Household from the market after receiving over 30,000 complaints from consumers about the privacy implications of the product. The Metromail division is under investigation. The Orange County sheriff's office has scaled back plans for its database. All of these stories ended well, or at least under control, but how are we to understand why these systems and products -- with their substantial privacy implications -- were developed in the first place? Were these strange, one-time aberrations in introducing abusive products? Or rather, were they particularly visible examples of a longer-term societal trend towards tightened surveillance and social control?
During the next decades we expect to see new streams of services whose technologies include computer components, such as on-line household-oriented medical diagnostic systems, vehicle identification and location systems, "smart cards" for shoppers, and so on. These information services attract customers, in part, by giving them a little more control over some part of their lives. But in collecting personally sensitive data, and placing it in organizational matrices of information sharing arrangements whose nature is not well understood by non-specialists, such systems also reduce many people's effective control over the use of information about themselves ("privacy").
These matrices of information sharing can be very different for different kinds of data, such as records about medical diagnoses and recent purchases. So these new services need not lead to a centralized ("panoptic") surveillance megasystem which can electronically integrate all digital records about any member of a society. What is at stake is the extent to which the resulting social order enables people to live dignified lives; that they can participate in diverse social and economic relationships that they can adequately comprehend and control; and that people are not thrust into crises because of errors or sublime idiosyncrasies of personal record systems.
This paper examines why some modern organizations find it attractive to develop and use these types of technologies and products. We will argue that certain societal and institutional arrangements reward organizations that develop such "informationalized services," and thus answer the question of why there is a constinuing threat to personal privacy through even undeveloped information technologies and routine organizational practices. ```
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