RECALIBRATE PRIVACY
Our personal definitions of privacy are both cultural and situational. They were different 100 years ago than they are today, and they’ll be different 100 years from now. They’re different in the US than they are in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere. They’re different across generations.
Right now, the Internet is forcing our attitudes about privacy to shift as never before. That’s because one of the main ways we use it is to learn about each other. Lawyers look up potential jurors. Job seekers look up company executives; company HR departments look up potential employees. Before a first date, people look up each other. This sort of thing even has a name: Google stalking.
Online, we are constantly probing, and occasionally violating, one another’s privacy. This can be pretty uncomfortable. The semi-permanent nature of Internet communications provides all sorts of opportunities for someone to embarrass you. E-mails you send to someone in private can easily be forwarded to others. Kids do this to each other all the time: forwarding private chats, photos, and messages, or showing each other private postings on social networking sites. One of the reasons apps that delete messages and photos after a few seconds are so popular among teenagers is that they help prevent this sort of thing. Old web pages have a way of sticking around. In 2010, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s old OKCupid dating profile was dug up for public discussion.
Even worse are people who use the Internet to shame and harass. Revenge porn—for the most part, ex-boyfriends posting compromising photographs of former girlfriends—is an extreme example. Mug shot extortion sites turn this sort of thing into a business. Mug shots are public record, but they’re not readily available. Owners of mug shot sites acquire the photos in bulk and publish them online, where everybody can find them, then charge individuals to remove their photos from the sites. It is extortion, although technically legal. None of this is going away, even if some instances of it are outlawed in some jurisdictions.
We need to figure this out. Everyone has the ability to buy sophisticated surveillance gear, so we need social norms that tell us when not to use it. We know more about one another than any one of us is comfortable with, so we need to develop social norms around acknowledging what we do know or pretending we don’t. This is essentially the point of David Brin’s 1998 book, The Transparent Society; ubiquitous surveillance is coming and we have to adapt.
The Internet has engendered the greatest generation gap since rock and roll. As Clay Shirky pointed out, it’s not that the elders were wrong about all the changes rock and roll would bring; it’s that they were wrong about how harmful they would be. People adapt. When everyone leaves a public digital trail of their personal thoughts since birth, no one will think twice about its being there. If technology means that everything we say—the regrettable accusations, the banalities, all of it—will be recorded and preserved eternally, we’re going to have to learn to live with that.
The problem is that we’re too good at adapting, at least in the short term. People who grow up with more surveillance will be more comfortable with it. Some of us went to schools with ID checks and metal detectors. Some of us work at buildings that demand daily badge checks. Most of us who fly in the US now accept TSA searches. And all of us who shop are no longer surprised about massive thefts of credit card numbers. These are all ways in which we have accustomed ourselves to having less privacy. Like many fundamental rights, privacy is one of those things that becomes noticed only when it’s gone. That’s unfortunate, because after it’s gone it’s much harder to regain.
We have to stop the slide. Fundamentally, the argument for privacy is a moral one. It is something we ought to have—not because it is profitable or efficient, but because it is moral. Mass surveillance should be relegated to the dustbin of history, along with so many other practices that humans once considered normal but are now universally recognized as abhorrent. Privacy is a human right. This isn’t a new idea. Privacy is recognized as a fundamental right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the European Convention on Human Rights (1970).
It’s in the US Constitution—not explicitly, but it’s implied in the Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments. It’s part of the 2000 Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. In 2013, the UN General Assembly approved a resolution titled “The right to privacy in the digital age,” affirming that our fundamental right to privacy applies online as well as offline, and the risk of mass surveillance undermines this right.
The principles are enshrined in both national and international law. We need to start following them. Privacy is not a luxury that we can only afford in times of safety. Instead, it’s a value to be preserved. It’s essential for liberty, autonomy, and human dignity. We must understand that privacy is not something to be traded away in some fearful attempt to guarantee security, but something to maintain and protect in order to have real security.
Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000)
ARTICLE 7: Respect for private and family life. Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications.
ARTICLE 8: Protection of personal data. 1. Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her. 2. Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned or some other legitimate basis laid down by law. Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified. 3. Compliance with these rules shall be subject to control by an independent authority.
None of this will happen without a change of attitude. In the end, we’ll get the privacy we as a society demand and not a bit more.
DON’T WAIT
The longer we wait to make changes, the harder it will become. On the corporate side, ubiquitous tracking and personalized advertising are already the norm, and companies have strong lobbying presences to stymie any attempt to change that. California’s Do Not Track law is an example of that: it started out as a good idea, but was completely defanged by the time it passed. The natural trajectory of surveillance technology (remember the declining cost from Chapter 2?) and the establishment of a new status quo will make changes much harder to achieve in the future, especially in the US.
It’s not just corporations that oppose change. Politicians like the same data that commercial advertisers do: demographic data, information about individual consumer preferences, political and religious beliefs. They use it in their campaigns, and won’t want to give it up. Convincing them to forgo access to data that helps them with targeted messaging and get-out-the-vote campaigns will be tough. And once someone figures out how to use this data to make elections permanently unfair, as gerrymandering does, change will be even harder.
At a conference last year, I overheard someone saying, “Google Analytics is the crack cocaine of Internet surveillance. Once you see it, you never want to give it up.” More generally, data becomes its own justification. The longer we wait, the more people and organizations become used to having broad access to our data and the more they will fight to maintain that access.
We’re at a unique time to make the sorts of changes I recommend in this book.
The industries that collect and resell our data are powerful, but they’re still relatively new. As they mature and become more entrenched, it will be much harder to make major changes in how they do business.
Snowden has forced government surveillance into the spotlight by revealing the actions of the NSA and GCHQ. This has produced some singular tensions amongst the world’s countries, between Germany and the US in particular. And in the US, this political tension cuts across the traditional partisan divide. There’s an opportunity for real change here. As Chicago mayor and former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” That’s true here, even if most people don’t realize that this is a crisis.
We’re at a unique moment in t
he relationship between the US and the EU. Both sides want to harmonize rules about this sort of thing, to make cross-border commerce easier. Things could go one of two ways: Europe could become more permissive to match the US, or the US could become more restrictive to match Europe. Once those rules get equalized, they’ll be harder to change.
We’re also in a unique time in the development of the information age. The Internet is being integrated into everything. We have temporary visibility of these systems. We can make changes now that will stand for decades.
Even so, we need to be prepared to do this all over again.
Technology constantly changes, making new things possible and old laws obsolete. There’s no reason to think that the security, privacy, and anonymity technologies that protect us against today’s threats will work against tomorrow’s.
Political realities also change, and laws change with them. It’s folly to believe that any set of solutions we establish today will hold forever, or even for half a century. A look back at recent US history suggests that gross abuses of executive power—and the resulting big public scandals and mitigating reforms—have occurred every 25 to 30 years. Consider the Palmer Raids in the 1920s, McCarthyism in the 1950s, abuses by the NSA and the FBI in the 1970s, and the ongoing post-9/11 abuses in the 2000s.
If you think about it, 30 years is about the career length of a professional civil servant. My guess is that’s not a coincidence. What seems to be going on is that we reform, we remember for a while why we implemented those reforms, and then eventually enough people change over in government that we begin to forget. And then we roll back the reforms and have to do the whole thing over again in a new technological context.
The next set of abuses is for another generation to reckon with, though. This one is ours.
I worry that we’re not up to it: that this is generational, and that it will be up to the next generation to make the social shifts necessary to enact policy changes that protect our fundamental privacy. I worry that the generation currently in charge is too scared of the terrorists, and too quick to give corporations anything they want. I hope I’m wrong.
THE BIG DATA TRADE-OFF
Most of this book is about the misuse and abuse of our personal data, but the truth is, this data also offers incredible value for society.
Our data has enormous value when we put it all together. Our movement records help with urban planning. Our financial records enable the police to detect and prevent fraud and money laundering. Our posts and tweets help researchers understand how we tick as a society. There are all sorts of creative and interesting uses for personal data, uses that give birth to new knowledge and make all of our lives better.
Our data is also valuable to each of us individually, to conceal or disclose as we want. And there’s the rub. Using data pits group interest against self-interest, the core tension humanity has been struggling with since we came into existence.
Remember the bargains I talked about in the Introduction. The government offers us this deal: if you let us have all of your data, we can protect you from crime and terrorism. It’s a rip-off. It doesn’t work. And it overemphasizes group security at the expense of individual security.
The bargain Google offers us is similar, and it’s similarly out of balance: if you let us have all of your data and give up your privacy, we will show you advertisements you want to see—and we’ll throw in free web search, e-mail, and all sorts of other services. Companies like Google and Facebook can only make that bargain when enough of us give up our privacy. The group can only benefit if enough individuals acquiesce.
Not all bargains pitting group interest against individual interest are such raw deals. The medical community is about to make a similar bargain with us: let us have all your health data, and we will use it to revolutionize healthcare and improve the lives of everyone. In this case, I think they have it right. I don’t think anyone can comprehend how much humanity will benefit from putting all of our health data in a single database and letting researchers access it. Certainly this data is incredibly personal, and is bound to find its way into unintended hands and be used for unintended purposes. But in this particular example, it seems obvious to me that the communal use of the data should take precedence. Others disagree.
Here’s another case that got the balance between group and individual interests right. Social media researcher Reynol Junco analyzes the study habits of his students. Many textbooks are online, and the textbook websites collect an enormous amount of data about how—and how often—students interact with the course material. Junco augments that information with surveillance of his students’ other computer activities. This is incredibly invasive research, but its duration is limited and he is gaining new understanding about how both good and bad students study—and has developed interventions aimed at improving how students learn. Did the group benefit of this study outweigh the individual privacy interest of the subjects who took part in it?
Junco’s subjects consented to being monitored, and his research was approved by a university ethics board—but what about experiments performed by corporations? The dating site OKCupid has been experimenting on its users for years, selectively showing or hiding photos, inflating or deflating compatibility measures, to see how such changes affect people’s behavior on the site. You can argue that we’ve learned from this experimentation, but it’s hard to justify manipulating people in this way without their knowledge or permission.
Again and again, it’s the same tension: group value versus individual value. There’s value in our collective data for evaluating the efficacy of social programs. There’s value in our collective data for market research. There’s value in it for improving government services. There’s value in studying social trends, and predicting future ones. We have to weigh each of these benefits against the risks of the surveillance that enables them.
The big question is this: how do we design systems that make use of our data collectively to benefit society as a whole, while at the same time protecting people individually? Or, to use a term from game theory, how do we find a “Nash equilibrium” for data collection: a balance that creates an optimal overall outcome, even while forgoing optimization of any single facet?
This is it: this is the fundamental issue of the information age. We can solve it, but it will require careful thinking about the specific issues and moral analysis of how the different solutions affect our core values.
I’ve met hardened privacy advocates who nonetheless think it should be a crime not to put your medical data into a society-wide database. I’ve met people who are perfectly fine with permitting the most intimate surveillance by corporations, but want governments never to be able to touch that data. I’ve met people who are fine with government surveillance, but are against anything that has a profit motive attached to it. And I’ve met lots of people who are fine with any of the above.
As individuals and as a society, we are constantly trying to balance our different values. We never get it completely right. What’s important is that we deliberately engage in the process. Too often the balancing is done for us by governments and corporations with their own agendas.
Whatever our politics, we need to get involved. We don’t want the FBI and NSA to secretly decide what levels of government surveillance are the default on our cell phones; we want Congress to decide matters like these in an open and public debate. We don’t want the governments of China and Russia to decide what censorship capabilities are built into the Internet; we want an international standards body to make those decisions. We don’t want Facebook to decide the extent of privacy we enjoy amongst our friends; we want to decide for ourselves. All of these decisions are bigger and more important than any one organization. They need to be made by a greater and more representative and inclusive institution. We want the public to be able to have open debates about these things, and “we the people” to be able to hold decision makers accountable.
I often turn to a statement
by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr: “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.” I am long-term optimistic, even if I remain short-term pessimistic. I think we will overcome our fears, learn how to value our privacy, and put rules in place to reap the benefits of big data while securing ourselves from some of the risks. Right now, we’re seeing the beginnings of a very powerful worldwide movement to recognize privacy as a fundamental human right, not just in the abstract sense we see in so many public pronouncements, but in a meaningful and enforceable way. The EU is leading the charge, but others will follow. The process will take years, possibly decades, but I believe that in half a century people will look at the data practices of today the same way we now view archaic business practices like tenant farming, child labor, and company stores. They’ll look immoral. The start of this movement, more than anything else, will be Edward Snowden’s legacy.
I started this book by talking about data as exhaust: something we all produce as we go about our information-age business. I think I can take that analogy one step further. Data is the pollution problem of the information age, and protecting privacy is the environmental challenge. Almost all computers produce personal information. It stays around, festering. How we deal with it—how we contain it and how we dispose of it—is central to the health of our information economy. Just as we look back today at the early decades of the industrial age and wonder how our ancestors could have ignored pollution in their rush to build an industrial world, our grandchildren will look back at us during these early decades of the information age and judge us on how we addressed the challenge of data collection and misuse.
Data and Goliath Page 26