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Statutory Frameworks for Regulating Information Flows: Drawing Lessons for the DNA Data Banks from other Government Data Systems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

David Lazer  and
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger
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Extract

The above bit string encodes personal information about one of the authors of this essay. Of course, without rules to decode the bit string, it is impossible to say whether it is genetic information, weight, age, fingerprint, religion, etc. Layered on top of that technical decoding process is a social decoding process – how sensitive is this information? How useful is it to the government for various purposes? The objective of this paper is to offer some key lessons for the regulation of genetic information collected by the state for law enforcement purposes. In the first part of the paper, we discuss two fundamental principles of informational privacy theory. Utilizing these, we then examine the statutory regimes that have emerged for the regulation of the information that the government collects in three different domains – fingerprints, department of motor vehicle (DMV) records, and tax records. In the third and final part we use the results of our analysis as analogies for similar regulatory challenges in the regulation of genetic information collected for law enforcement purposes, and make some tentative recommendations.

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , Summer 2006 , pp. 366 - 374
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2006

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References

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