This working group has been preparing draft documents on principles for providing and using personal information. Given the widespread impact of an information highway, the ethical issues are too complex to be left solely to a government working group. This conference, and in its own way this paper, is intended to contribute an additional perspective on these issues. Constitutional empowerment requires that citizens be able to make informed decisions about political, economic, and social questions. Restraints on executive power and broad access to the political process are also components of constitutional empowerment.
Individual autonomy refers to citizens functioning as individuals.
It can easily be compromised by excessive surveillance to build databases and irresponsible dissemination of individually identifiable data. Institutions designed to mediate such conflicts over information issues may well need to be created. Largely because of rapidly changing computer networking technology, legislation inevitably lags in addressing contemporary concerns. Separating these mandates would seem to produce insurmountable coordination problems and, indeed, might institutionalize disputes between data protectors and data use advocates. Some technical issues of computer privacy Users of information systems want remote access to large-scale databases through computerized telecommunications networks.