The ubiquity of digital gadgets and sensors, the pervasiveness of networks and the benefits of sharing very personal information through social media have led some to argue that privacy as a social norm is changing and becoming an outmoded concept. In a seven-part series Don Tapscott questions this view arguing that we each need a personal privacy strategy. This post is Part Six of that series. For previous articles go here.
George Orwell's iconic text Nineteen Eighty Four described the dystopian society where a totalitarian state rules in its own interests and everyone is under constant surveillance by authorities. "Big Brother is watching you" became the rallying call for privacy advocates around the world.
Today Orwell's "telescreens" have been replaced by ubiquitous, ambient networked computing where billions and soon trillions of devices connected to networks collect real-time data. True, in the developed world governments are not totalitarian, but many advocates of personal "openness" are naïve -- assuming that governments are benevolent and will act in the interests of their citizens.
Fascism, Stalinism, McCarthyism, and the myriad repressive and totalitarian states of the last decades and today should remind us that our personal data can be used against us. Listen to Pete Seeger's "Knock on the Door" ("here they come to take one more") for a reminder. And today in the name of national security, governments are collecting real time information from us, sampling phone calls, emails, social networks, and taking our biometrics at airports and a growing list of other places.
I was reminded of the dangers recently when meeting Ron Deibert, Director of the Citizen Lab that monitors and fights against government attempts to use the Internet against its citizens. The meeting was cut short because he had a situation to deal with. The Syrian Government had created a "phantom Facebook" and was using that to harvest names and personal data of dissidents, presumably so that they could hunt them down and kill them.
"But this could never happen here" you say? We actually have very little idea exactly what governments are doing with the flood of personal information about us. And the aftermath of 9/11 should remind us just how quickly our civil liberties can be undermined in the name of national security. Everywhere in democratic societies governments are campaigning to intrude into our private lives to collect more information. In the UK the "Intercept Modernisation Plan" would permit authorities to intercept every form of online communication, all in aid of vague goals of fighting crime.
Recently the New York Times reported that "Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight."
The Times reports that this practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, as carriers market a catalog of "surveillance fees" to police departments to determine a suspect's location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services.
Sure, you could argue that it's becoming difficult to restrict the information that governments can collect and yes of course we need to be vigilant about how that information should be used. But we still need to resist attempts of governments to collect unnecessary information. We still need to fight for the basic privacy principle of "data minimization" -- of limiting the information collected to clearly definable and socially helpful purposes.
There should be no tapping of phones or anything else without due process. If a government agency proposes to set up video camera in your neighborhood, you need to decide if the benefits of possible crime reduction outweigh the possible dangers of unknown governments being able to watch you constantly.
Or increasingly, governments want to collect biometrics information about you -- like fingerprints, retinal scans and even DNA. We each need to make choices. Sometimes this benefits you with better government services or faster movement through airports. But what are the long term implications should a government agency or individual become malevolent? The average person must be cautious and vigilant and even resist the collection of unnecessary personal information.
To me, it's not so likely the future will not look like Orwell's 1984 or Jeremy Bentham's panopticon prison, or an east bloc police state during the Cold War. Those are metaphors from another era that depended upon a single, all-knowing malevolent power seeking control. The more appropriate metaphor for the growing loss of privacy today is found in Frank Kafka's The Trial where the central character awaits trial and judgment from an inscrutable bureaucracy for a crime that he is not told about, using evidence that is never revealed to him, in a process that is equally random and inscrutable. In likewise manner, we, too will be judged and sentenced in our absentia by unknown public and private bureaucracies having access to our personal data. We will be the targets of social engineering, decisions and discrimination and we will never really know what or why.
If history is any guide, advances in privacy have tended to arise in the wake of widespread privacy abuses, for example, the negative effects of mass printing presses, the emergence of the fascist state, the abuses of credit reporting companies in the 1960s. Something similar may be happening today with data breaches and identity theft "in the cloud," as more and more people come to understand the pain and consequences of personal data misuse.
Next up: "Corporate Secrecy and Personal Privacy are Opposites"
Don Tapscott is the author of 14 books about technology in business and society, most recently with Anthony D. Williams "Macrowikinomics." He discusses these ideas on twitter @dtapscott
Follow Don Tapscott on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dtapscott
Robert Siciliano: Identity Theft Still on the Rise
Those that refuse are not hired.
This is the new discrimination against workers and is spurring a growth in small businesses for people that have enough intrusion from corporations.
But to get to the point, a corporation should not have to have your medical records, police records and credit records or insist that you live a defined corporate lifestyle when you are off the clock. All a corporation should be concerned with is your references, experience and skills when hiring.
We have created a technological monster when it relates to corporate hiring practices even for the most mundane of jobs and have left many qualified people behind in the unemployment line.
Some of us are fighting hard to maintain our privacy. I run 3 very different operating systems with different alias for all 3 volumes. I don't do FB, not interested in 15 min of fame or sharing my personal whatever with the world which can access a time-line of my rantings at will. I have so many different email & twitter accounts, I keep in my head and don't bother to write down, and I twitter via a tunnel. I don't use Google, just chucked Microsoft and never used anything Apple. You have to search hard to find my real identity in a database online, real hard. Used to like subscribing to youtube channels until Google went gaga silly and started linking everything and you have to work hard to stay away from their location and other tracking which is on another level. Finally had to go to the website for my browser and change the code since I like Firefox sometimes and they package Google with the browser. Just changing the settings via preferences and in private browsing wasn't enough.
I'm not hiding I have just been computing for a very long time and have watched the internet change drastically and I am shocked by what I see. GPS & soon IPS tracking by indoor wifi devices. Tracking you all over the internet. IPS blocking is an easy fix, turn of wifi on your phone & tablet and turn off your radio signal after use. My router has a button for that. In addition, you can get private VPN services for your router & devices. The things we now have to do to stay private is ridiculous. Then you add on the government legislation and you almost want to disconnect totally. i could go on and on. Don't forget the tape over the webcam and no clouds. Oh don't forget OTA trackers disguised as patches or updates and all my devices are rooted and have custom roms.
Find a bogey man, create fear, exploit it - wash, rinse, repeat.
Integrity is an integral part of capitalism IF capitalism is to be a viable economic system within a peaceful and prosperous long-lasting society; however, corrupt croney capitalism is already well on its way toward shutting down every effort of capitalism with integrity at its core on a global scale.
The more effective weapons become, the more difficult it will be for the majority to overthrow the tyranny of any minority that, by whatever means --via force, corruption and/or deception--achieves control of a government.
"All great nations rise and fall." The USA is in a serious political and economic tailspin. The next decade could well decide the fate of America as a nation.
Will the moneyed investor class win its class warfare?
Will America be a society where the wealthy puppeteers and their-bought-and-paid-for polititions have all the privileges and reap all of the benefits of society while workers just barely survive?
Or will "we, the people" finally reject the slogans and false promises and actually END the policies that perpetuate immense wealth and maintain and/or increase the immense economic gap between the" haves" and "have nots"?
Sadly some "values voters" do not understand that unless and until we all have individual liberty, none of us really do.
The economically upper-middle-class voters keep protecting the wealthy in the near VAIN hope that they, too, will soon join that economic class.
Since before modern civilization -- from when the world was organized in tribes and governed by kings -- class warfare has been and is still being waged on the have-nots by the haves to "conserve" that status quo.
To protect not freedom but, instead, the interests of US global bu$ine$$, the military industrial congressional complex marches on.
Unless the US economy is RESHAPED to close the immense wealth gap and unless those who would deny individual liberty to others can find enlightenment from the "dark ages" they inhabit, the once bright promise of America can only be described as in decline.