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The Eroded Self
The New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy story today titled The Eroded Self . The author chronicles a wide assortment of privacy abuses, and has a very thoughtful treatment of the harm that is caused when every move you make is scanned, analyzed and permanently recorded.
OOG LIVE IN CAVE MANY YEARS AS METHOD OF KEEPING PRIVACY FROM OUTSIDE WORLD!!! BUT NOW OOG FIND SELF THREATENED BY TRACKING TECHNOLOGY AND LIKE!!! OOG ESPECIALLY SICK OF ACTIONS SUCH AS DOUBLECLICK AND OTHER SUCH ADVERTISING FIRMS TRYING TO COLLECT DATA FOR GREEDY MARKETING REASONS!!! OOG PRAY THAT SOCIETY DONT EVOLVE INTO ORWELIAN NIGHTMARE DOMINATED BY MONITORING!!! OOG THINK LARGE EFFORT NEED CONTINUOUSLY PLACED ON KEEPING INTERNET SECURE FOR USERS AND FIGHT EFFORTS OF OBNOXIOUS PRIVACY INVADING COMPANIES AND SOFTWARE!!! OOG MAY NOT DO BAD THING ON COMPUTER, BUT OOG DESERVE RIGHT TO SELECTIVELY CHOOSE WHAT DATA ABOUT OOG TO RELEASE FOR PUBLIC CONUSUMPTION!!!
OOG THE OPEN SOURCE CAVEMAN!!! OOG BREAK HEAD WITH OPEN SOURCE CD!!!
It's typical to do web searches and deja.com searches on all technical job applicants. More than anything, this turns up flame wars the person may have been involved in or really stupid activities ("Got any warez?"). People when tend to get in raving Usenet battles about OpenGL vs. Direct3D, Linux vs. Windows, Windows vs. Macintosh, GeForce vs. Voodoo, Athlon vs. Pentium, etc., are people you don't want to have to work with every day. In general, someone who fits the fan-boy personality has two strikes against him, as unfair as that may seem.
Welcome to the Internet, the free-information Utopia imagined by writers such as Jon Katz. There are no boundaries, no walls, no way to contain the flow of information, including anything about your life: purchases, consumer preferences, physical address, etc.
While many thinkers have hearlded the dawning of this new information age as a way of having open access to art, history, science, the media, government, and other sources, they have in general failed to imagine the "negative" aspects of this openness: that wants you get it going, nothing can stop it. Further, you're the next target.
Now, you might be like me, an ordinary guy, just sitting at the computer, eating a Cadbury bar and drinking water, not thinking about your privacy, but at any given moment, you're information is being traded behind your back by any number of coporations, banks, government agencies, and private citizens. But should you be concerned?
Looking out the window, I see no black helicopters flying overhead. No g-men are breaking down my door to arrest me for having bootleg CDs. In fact, my life is no different than before. Sure, I get spam, sometimes, and tagreted banner ads, but spam gets deleted and I can just use IJB anyway. If these are you biggest problems, consider yourself lucky.
Personally, I think the privacy freaks have it all wrong. With the Internet, all digital material, including your personal info, can't be contained. So what if advertisers know that you're a raving Linux zealot? Isn't it their business to know how to offer you consumer goods targeted at tech-savvy buyers? As far as I'm concerned, the Internet and capitalism go hand-in-hand, and this exchange of information will help capitalism, which will in turn help out the Internet far more than government robots like Gore or George "there ought to be limits to freedom" Bush. Your privacy is long gone, but right now we can at least enjoy the benefits that it brings, as long as the U.S. government doesn't screw something up (I'm speaking as and for USians now).
So you have a choice: you can either accept your loss of privacy and get the great economic and technological benefits that it brings, or attempt to cripple the system with laws, which won't bring back your lost privacy anyway. Remember, it was us, the geeks, who wanted free information. This is our reward. Let's use it wisely.
I thought that it was a very good article, and that the author put his finger on many of the important issues, and why privacy IS important. However, he goes completely off the track at the end when he starts babbeling stuff like this:
"Moreover, many people seem happy to waive their privacy rights in exchange for free stuff. There is now a cottage industry of companies with names like Free PC, Dash.com and Gator.com that offer their users product discounts, giveaways or even cash in exchange for permission to track, record and profile every move they make, and to bombard them with targeted ads on the basis of their proclivities. This is about as rational as allowing a camera into your bedroom in exchange for a free toaster. But as Monica Lewinsky discovered, it's easy to forget why privacy is important until information you care about is taken out of context, and by that point, it's usually too late."
With this, he is falling right into the most dangerous of socialist ideas: that that we, who know better, should by law protect the common man from his own stupidity. I find such thinking arrogant, disgusting, and a much bigger threat to freedom (witness what past implementation of socialism accomplished) then anything Doubleclick does with my cookies. You can't, and shouldn't, save sane adults from themselves. If somebody wants to screw up there life by selling their privacy and integrity for a free buck, they should be allowed to do so.
I am not a rightwing conservative (I consider myself a pragmatic radical), but if this writer thinks that the way to save society for the future is to further dilute the individuals freedom and responsibility to make his own descisions, then I couldn't disagree more. It is only by learning to protect our own privacy and freedom that we can find a future where we are not the food to governments and corporations.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
As the tools required to keep this data become cheaper, and the laws to prevent it's proliforation are not put in place, these tidbits grow into a complete biography.
Look at the example below and ask yourself: where would you draw the line?
John Smith resides at 123 Elm street.
and he has 48% equity in his house.
and is married with 2 kids.
and he wears 34/32 size pants.
(usually dockers from WalMart).
and he likes renting movies from blockbuster.
and his youngest just got out of a drug rehab.
and he likes those little bite sized carrots.
and his favorite search phrase is "married and flirting"
and his wife spends $150 a month at victorias secret.
and she likes bottled water.
and spends $45 a month on duracell bateries.
and her favorite search phrase is "hot wax"
and his oldest daughter is on the honor roll and she had an abortion last summer.
etc..etc..
So where would you draw the line? Do have any way of knowing if a lists such as this exists? If so, what are your rights?
I would put forth that collecting such extensive and detailed information amounts to writing a biography about me and my life. Like a snapshot, this biography should be the copyright of the individual.
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Dear lord! i shudder to think of what we might discover about ourselves, our neighbors, and our fellow humans if privacy disappears totally! We might find startling things like:
/.
1) Guys masturbate....frequently!
2) Guys look at pr0n on the net....frequently!
3) The vast majority of non quadropalegic (sp?) people LOVE to have sex....as well as some of the quadropalegic ones to.
4) They'll find out who REALLY was downloading all those damned Dr. Dre mp3's. We really need to get to the bottom of that! If not for ourselves....for our children!!!!
5) Natalie Portman herself is actually behind all of the "hot grits" propaganda on
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I recently did a search for my own name, email addresses and website. Sure enough I found stuff from as long ago as 1995, almost (by a few months) as long as I've been using the net. Even though I didn't know about USENET etc. then I still had left a single entry in a long forgotten, but still running, guestbook. 5 years later it was one of the first things that I found.
The density of the data being collected about you is similar. As the bariers to collection are lowered and the costs of maintenance keep falling, a complete picture of you and your life comes into being. Slowly, week by week, the density of data grows into a complete bio on you and the life that you thought was your own.
All I'm abdicating is a law that asks the keepers of this data to seek the informed consent of the people before adding the data to the picture.
___
So you have a choice: you can either accept your loss of privacy and get the great economic and technological benefits that it brings, or attempt to cripple the system with laws, which won't bring back your lost privacy anyway.
I. What are the great economic benefits of losing my privacy? The granting of the ability to someone I got in a flame war with to open a fraudulent credit card account with my name and address? Or is it granting the right to advertising companies to follow me like a hound? Offhand, I can't remember the title, but I read a story once where a guy's supermarket sent him tons of e-mail, reminding him to restock certain goods, advising him to stop buying so much aspirin and go see a doctor, etc. Is that what you want your Inbox to look like? More spam? So much for the economic benefits... what about the technological ones? I'm not about to trade privacy for goods and services. As I mentioned above, the less traceable I am to megacorporations, the less traceable I am to my enemies. I suspect they may even be the same party....
II. Laws don't cripple the system. The lawyers that try to twist their meaning for their clients' ends do. The system tried to retain its integrity by getting wordy and specific, which left gaping loopholes and strange logic as goofy and error-prone as indirectly recursive functions.
III. Laws may not be able to bring back lost privacy, but they can make it illegal to further erode that privacy. And they give an avenue of attack if an artificial person sells you. Provided they don't become prey to what I mentioned in part II. If you want to see a broken/stupid law, go read COPPA.
If information wants to be free, then we must actively combat letting harmful information out of the cage. Indeed, censor it. Or do we wish to let the darkness freely roam the land? The ability to make bombs confers power... power that is as blind to its consequences as greed is to those it treads on. "Human resources" takes on a sinister new meaning.
Disclaimer: I am not anti-capitalist, anti-US, or pro-political correctness. I choose to exercise thought in determining policy on a particular situation. Saying how to make bombs and saying "Personnel" are quite different, and should be given different rules of censorship.
-- LoonXTall
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.