Popular Science has a great piece this month from a reporter named Catherine Price who tried to be anonymous for a week. She took out 7 days worth of cash, tried to anonymize her web-surfing, didn’t use her credit cards or her cell phone, wore a visor and dark glasses in public, instructed her bank and phone company not to sell her personal info, avoided government buildings and the E-Z pass lane to avoid surveillance cameras, and a whole host of other measures. And she discovered that it was nearly impossible to be truly anonymous nevertheless.
One of her sources claims that in a few years, it will be actually impossible to be anonymous, because tiny tracking devices called RFID chips will have become so prevalent and seemingly innocuous. Apparently, I already have one in my passport, since I just had a new one made last year, and a company called VeriChip has already experimentally implanted them in 500 people, and has proposed replacing the "dog tags" of U.S. soldiers with the devices! Logan’s Run, anyone? (N.B. The government-implanted red device in the hand is from this brilliant cult sci-fi movie, and is not actually an RFID).
At the close of the article, Price connects the difficulty of maintaining privacy with the increased sophistication of data mining. Not only is it hard not to turn your personal info to databases, you have almost no control over what banks, universities, corporations, or the government do with it once they get — or if they fail to protect it.
I find this type of thing deeply invasive and sinister — but there is a certain school of thought that says, "who cares about privacy, it’s a bourgeois Thoreauvian myth — and if data mining keeps me safe from terrorists and makes things run more smoothly at the mall, I’m all for it." Where do you guys fall on the privacy spectrum?
Accidental Blogger 
6 responses to “Is Privacy Dead? (Andrew)”
Wishing for privacy moving forward is kind of like wishing to meet an elf, unicorn, or leprechaun. Yeah, it would be cool to hang out in the magical tree-kingdoms of Tolkien’s elves, but it’s not going to happen. What’s most important is probably to have appropriate and effective checks and oversight mechanisms.
LikeLike
Interesting you should mention it. A friend and I were talking at length about privacy issues (lack of privacy, that is) today as we drove to the beach – cameras at the toll plazas are obvious. The multitude of cameras that we are unaware of are everywhere. Yet, if you check with my kids, lack of privacy is the norm – YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook – they live with/by/for them. Remember the fifties when everything was private? Who knew what went on behind closed doors – Cancer was hushed about and called “C”; nobody was “gay”; I thought all the other families were like Beaver Cleaver’s. And now, here I am, age 57 in the Blogosphere. And yes, Judith Shapiro is my real name.
LikeLike
Judith: I understand completely what you said – especially the part about starting a blog in mid life. :-)
I think what bugs us is not so much that the details of our private lives are public but whether we gave our permission for them to become public. That autonomy (or the perception of autonomy) is what we care about. Yet we don’t really have much choice. What can we obtain or accomplish in today’s world without giving out personal data? Virtually nothing.
LikeLike
Privacy is dead, at least in the United States and the U.K. It may be still alive in some form in many other less-wired countries, so that moving there is always an option for people who want to erase their tracks completely.
LikeLike
Forget phonetaps and internet transactions/email, now it’s just the regular old mail that’s being opened. I remember some months back when my complaints of some letters being opened to the postmaster were shrugged off as: “We don’t know who’s doing this…certainly not us.”
Even my daughter’s Flat Stanley project may have gotten a ‘special detour‘ before arriving a few days ago.
LikeLike
If I actually stop and think about the countless ways in which my movements, purchases, etc… are tracked on a daily basis (and how long the intrusion has been occuring) it makes my head practically explode. (Hence my need for anti-anxiety medication.)
I think many people are really unaware of the extent to which their rights are infringed upon – as many of the identification systems and technological advances that currently allow “big brother” to be all up in our business were introduced for other, well-intentioned, seemingly innocuous reasons. The “function creep” that subsequently occured – due to a lack of legislative protections, etc… then went quite unnoticed.
For e.g. when Social Security numbers were first issued in 1936, the federal government assured the public that use of the numbers would be limited to Social Security programs. Today, however, the Social Security number (SSN) is the most frequently used recordkeeping number in the United States. The use of SSNs has expanded from governmental to non-governmental purposes and is regularly used for employee files, medical records, health insurance accounts, credit and banking accounts, university ID cards, and many other purposes. “In the name of efficiency and rationality, huge computer banks match our social security numbers to almost every phase of our life, giving the government a permanent and complete warehouse of data on all our activities.” (Quote from Simon Davies’ “Touching BigBrother: How Biometric Technology Will Fuse Flesh and Machine”).
Census data offers another example of the phenomenon of function creep. Census records were originally created for general statistical purposes. Census records were then used during World War II to round up innocent Japanese Americans and place them in internment camps, a use that went far beyond its original purpose. More recently, census data has been used to develop anti-terrorism air passenger profiling systems. Next?
Of particular interest to me is the horror of involuntary DNA testing – function creep at its finest. States have gone from collecting DNA from convicted sex offenders – the original target group for DNA profiling (on the theory that sex offenders are likely to be recidivists and that they frequently leave biological evidence – a great “sell” to the public) – to data banks of all violent offenders, to juvenile offenders in 30 or so states. There are rapid-fire proposals to expand DNA profiling even further, to new and ever greater numbers of persons. California is leading the way – having enacted a law fairly recently that authorizes the collection of DNA material on an involuntary basis from all persons who have merely been arrested for a crime. There are virtually no protections in state or federal law to protect or limit the use of samples once collected. Scary!
So yes – we have cause to be looking over our shoulders….
LikeLike