Liberals are more likely to grant individuals privacy rights and Conservatives more likely to grant businesses privacy rights. Finally, we need to consider how to protect individuals, firms and governments from unrestricted flows of information. For individuals trying to prevent the collection of information by other institutions is probably unenforceable because probably cause is required to obtain a search warrant. Two approaches are encryption and having decision criterion in the open. Next, scientists seated at their terminals need to be able to observe the system in order to improve our understanding of political economic behavior.
Most current information collected by government is for administrative purposes, for example, taxes.
Restrictions such as trade secrets prevent the government from releasing detailed information. Consequently most government information is both expensive to collect and of little use in understanding the behavior of the system. The issue of scientific information policy is to what extent should scientists be able to obtain representative samples of observations of political economic behavior that they are studying. These representative samples do not need to contain labels identifying the subject in order to reveal relationships in the behavior of the sample. The advance in information technology and communications networks such as the Net have greatly increased many social thinkers concern for the loss in privacy.