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.

Comments

OOG STRESS IMPORTANCE OF PRIVACY!!!

[OOG_THE_CAVEMAN]

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!!!

Privacy is dead: welcome to the Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Socialist trap.

[Hobbex]

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.