The Real Privacy Problem by Evgeny Morozov.
A deeply provocative essay that has me re-considering my personal position on privacy.
Not about my personal privacy.
A more general concern that the loss of privacy will lead to less and less transparency and accountability of corporations and governments.
Consider this passage from the essay:
If you think Simitis was describing a future that never came to pass, consider a recent paper on the transparency of automated prediction systems by Tal Zarsky, one of the world’s leading experts on the politics and ethics of data mining. He notes that “data mining might point to individuals and events, indicating elevated risk, without telling us why they were selected.” As it happens, the degree of interpretability is one of the most consequential policy decisions to be made in designing data-mining systems. Zarsky sees vast implications for democracy here:
A non-interpretable process might follow from a data-mining analysis which is not explainable in human language. Here, the software makes its selection decisions based upon multiple variables (even thousands) … It would be difficult for the government to provide a detailed response when asked why an individual was singled out to receive differentiated treatment by an automated recommendation system. The most the government could say is that this is what the algorithm found based on previous cases.
This is the future we are sleepwalking into. Everything seems to work, and things might even be getting better—it’s just that we don’t know exactly why or how.
Doesn’t that sound like the circumstances we find with the NSA telephone surveillance? No one denies that they broke the law, lied to Congress about it, etc. but they claim to have protected the U.S. public.
Really? And where is that information? Oh, some of it was shown to a small group of selected Senators and they thought some unspecified part of it looked ok, maybe.
I don’t know about you but that doesn’t sound like accountability or transparency to me.
Moreover the debate doesn’t even start in the right place. Violation of our telephone privacy is already a crime.
The NSA leadership and staff should be in the criminal dock when the questioning starts, not a hearing room on Capital Hill.
Moreover, “good faith” is not a defense to criminal conduct in the law. It really doesn’t matter than you thought your dog was telling to you to protect us from terrorists by engaging in widespread criminal activity. Even if you thought your dog was speaking for the Deity.
If there is no accountability and/or transparency on the part of government/corporatons, there is a driving desire to make citizens completely transparent and accountable to both government and corporations:
Habits, activities, and preferences are compiled, registered, and retrieved to facilitate better adjustment, not to improve the individual’s capacity to act and to decide. Whatever the original incentive for computerization may have been, processing increasingly appears as the ideal means to adapt an individual to a predetermined, standardized behavior that aims at the highest possible degree of compliance with the model patient, consumer, taxpayer, employee, or citizen.
What Simitis is describing here is the construction of what I call “invisible barbed wire” around our intellectual and social lives. Big data, with its many interconnected databases that feed on information and algorithms of dubious provenance, imposes severe constraints on how we mature politically and socially. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas was right to warn—in 1963—that “an exclusively technical civilization … is threatened … by the splitting of human beings into two classes—the social engineers and the inmates of closed social institutions.”
The more data both the government and corporations collect, the less accountability and transparency they have and the more accountability and transparency they want to impose on the average citizen.
A very good reason why putting users in control of their data is a non-answer to the privacy question. Enabling users to “sell” their data just gives them the illusion of a choice when their choices are in fact dwindling with each bit of data that is collected.
All hope is not lost, see Morozov’s essay for some imaginative thinking on how to deepen and broaden the debate over privacy.
Some of the questions I would urge people to raise are:
- Should websites be allowed to collect tracking data at all?
- Should domestic phone traffic be tracked other than for billing and then discarded (hourly)?
- Should credit card companies be allowed to keep purchase histories more than 30 days old?
In terms of slogans, consider this one: Data = Less Freedom. (D=LF)