Read at your own risk

This article discusses how interactive media threaten informational privacy, especially in a legal environment that fails to protect individuals' right to receive and use content without being scrutinized by private and government institutions.The article observes that as information about media consumption habits make up an increasingly large share of the stock of data that institutions can use in order to make inferences about individuals, it becomes increasingly more difficult for individuals to determine which types of behaviors would cause them to be assigned to a high-risk category. In the light of this observation, the article concludes by proposing that in order to address the uncertainty that individuals face in trying to figure out how institutions use personal information to categorize them into different risk groups, a privacy protection scheme that increases the accountability of these automated and manual interpretation processes is needed.