Online/Offline is a false dichotomy
Two months ago I read The Numerati, in which Stephen Baker discusses how technology—particularly the Internet—is affecting marketing techniques and how businesses and individuals manage their data. Now that we have the tools and understanding to mathematically model more behaviour than ever before, there’s a new group of people—the eponymous Numerati—at the forefront of this information revolution.
One of the concerns Baker briefly addresses is privacy. On the Internet, this has always been an issue, but the surge in popularity of social networking this year makes it even more relevant. MySpace and Facebook have made headlines with the Lori Drew case and the launch of identity management Facebook Connect.1 What was once a matter of “privacy” is now a question of the most appropriate mechanism for managing the convergence of one’s offline and online personae.
And I can’t help but feel that some people are missing the point.
What is Privacy?
Like “Web 2.0”, we tend to throw the term “privacy” around quite a bit without much thought to what we actually want when we demand it. Does this merely mean we want our bank account details safe? Or do we actually want a guarantee of anonymity (if we choose it)? Is our personal data only private if we keep it secret, or is it still private if we share it with other people (such as friends or corporations) as long as it isn’t available to the general public?
Let’s face it though: in the evanescent medium of the Internet, any strict definitions regularly become obsolete. So instead, let’s define privacy as a mode of operation rather than a state of being. Online, privacy is more an ability of a user to control how his or her personal data is distributed. Privacy settings on web sites are an excellent example of this mode of operation: the web site gives the user the choice of what to reveal.
But We Just Wanna Have Fun
Then apparently you haven’t heard the news: the Internets are serious businesses. This is hard for many people to accept—it’s so easy to go online, create a fake identity, and begin fooling around. Yet at its core, the Internet is not a fictitious world or some sort of MMORPG. While you can often assume the cloak of anonymity,2 increasingly services expect you to dole out personal details and geographical information.
I can understand why this has privacy advocates concerned. It won’t be long, they argue, before everyone is chipped with evil, insecure RFID devices that allow the Google Overlords to track our every movement and even read our minds, right? After all, as soon as we tell a service on the Internet not only who we are, but where we live, it’s only a matter of time before an axe murderer shows up at our door, right?
It’s good to be wary and vigilant of flagrant violations of one’s privacy. However, these sort of overreactions are indicative, in my opinion, of a misunderstanding of the Internet as a communication medium. In that sense, the Internet really is something new. We’ve never had a communication medium quite like it. The Internet’s effect on society is tantamount to that of the printing press on fifteenth century European society—but it is also so much more. The Internet is both a library and a conference centre. When people pull out their mobile phones and say, “This is my office,” they aren’t necessarily joking.
The true potential of the Internet will never be realized unless we accept that geostamping is as much of a necessity as timestamping. Since the inception of the Internet, content creators regularly date the work they publish online—yet only recently have we begun tagging that work with geographical information. Now websites like Flickr can automatically geostamp your photos using the information embedded into the uploaded photograph. While watchdogs call that a privacy violation, I call that awesome. (And you can turn it off if you don’t like it.)
Knowledge Is Slavery
The counterargument to handing all our data over to the Google Overlords is to trot out George Orwell’s 1984 and staple the adjective “Orwellian” to everything. Now, I admit I often worry about that. Giving Google my personal information is one of my favourite pastimes, but is it a dangerous pastime? Is Google going to start editing the Internet to retcon reality?
The short answer is: no. The explanation to the short answer is: you won’t let them—at least, I hope.
See, the thing about 1984 is that Orwell wasn’t cautioning us against “Big Brother” type dystopian societies—most of us were already against those at the time. He was cautioning us that those sort of societies spring up because we don’t do anything about it. That message is kind of hitting home after recent events in Canada … but anyway, I digress.
My point is that there’s still plenty of room on the Internet for individuals and countercultures to survive. That’s the beauty of the Internet: as long as you have the technology, you can rebuild it, recreate it, and make it better than it was before. You only run into problems when you have a government, like China, that begins dictating what you can or can’t do when you browse the Internet and enforce it technologically. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, however, but that was not an isolated incident in China—that sort of government restriction was present in every part of the lives of Chinese citizens. Similarly, if we see the inception of an “Orwellian Internet”, it will happpen because we the people have sold out.
In short, Orwellian society begets Orwellian Internet, not the other way around. Orwellian. Orwellian. Orwellian.
Great adjective.
Wait, You‘re Still Reading This?
I would recommend The Numerati to everyone, not just people with an interest in this field. The book is very short and doesn’t go into the mathematical specifics behind this statistical analysis—Baker’s a business writer, not a math geek like me—so it’s quite understandable to laypeople. In his conclusion, Baker says:
So we’re going to have to reevaluate our ideas about privacy and secrets … until recently, our secrets were scattered…. Most of them, if we played it right, didn’t mingle much. Unless a detective was on the case, the bits of information didn’t find each other. Now they can and they will.
This can be scary. No doubt it will tempt a few of us to turn away from the data-spewing world altogether. Some will tiptoe around the Internet, if they venture there at all….
But with a bit of knowledge, we can turn these tools to our advantage. You may not have noticed, but as we make our way in these pages from the snooping workplace to the laboratories of love, we gradually evolve from data serfs into data masters…. We’re appealing to the science of the Numerati to protect us from falls and alert us before strokes and heart attacks…. The point is, these statistical tools are going to be quietly assuming more and more power in our lives. We might as well learn how to grab the controls and use them for [our] own interests. (204-5)
Before that, Baker makes another statement that pretty much sums up my entire view toward privacy: “The personal data can be shared but not the identity” (204). How many of you have done anonymous surveys, or checked off a box that says, “Yes, you can share my data as long as you don’t associate with my identity”? For those of you that haven’t—are you sure? How many of you honestly read through those tiresome EULAs that accompany any of the software you install—many of those include clauses that permit the software to anonymously report data about how you use the software.
As Baker explains, this sort of data is neither good nor bad. What matters is who uses it and how they use it. Unless you become a hermit3, achieving total privacy is impractical. So rather than run from the Google overlords, these Numerati, learn about them. Learn what they do with your data, and be vigilant in how you manage your online identity.
There are risks associated with any venture, and the Internet is no different in this case. Every time you connect your computer to it, you take the risk that you’ll inadvertently download a virus or be deluged with spam. But like many risky ventures, I think the Internet is worth that risk.
The debate over privacy should not be about how to keep your secrets—well, secret. That is a lost cause. Instead, the debate should be over how best to manage those secrets, and how to make sure our personal data is used to benefit us rather than exploit us.
Google Chrome, Part 2: All Your Base Are Belong to Google
Yesterday, I explained why I was excited about Google getting into the browser game. Of course, no new Google venture is complete without some people taking issue with Google’s privacy policies. In this case, the controversy was around Google Chrome’s EULA, specifically section 11.1. Now, since everything on the Internet happens at the speed of light, Google has already changed the wording of that clause and applied it retroactively, claiming that it was all a mistake by the lawyers behind the curtain. However, this incident reminds us of just how much data Google collects, not to mention privacy issues online as a whole.
I should begin with the disclaimer that I am not a Google fanboy. I love some of Google’s services—I use Gmail, although I prefer to check my mail through Mozilla Thunderbird’s interface, and Google Calendar is my favourite calendar application. However, I’m perfectly willing to criticize Google. I try not to be a fanboy of anything, but if I were, I‘d be a Joss Whedon fanboy. So I’m going to hijack this post to mention that the Dr. Horrible soundtrack is available for purchase on iTunes. That is all.
The Internet is transforming us into a global village as Marshall McLuhan predicted. More and more information concerning our offline personae is being stored in a digital form and then transferred all around the world, whether we know of it or not. Companies that exist primarily to gather data (like Google, a search engine company) always want more. How much are we willing to give?
When addressing the issue of privacy on the Internet, I’ve decided to tackle four questions. Firstly, what do we want when we yell “privacy!” on forums and blogs? It’s a word, but what does it mean? Next, what criteria should we use to determine which institutions to trust with our private data? And who is to blame when that data gets leaked or shared with third parties? Lastly, let’s put on our pragmatist caps and consider the reality of the Internet today: what’s feasible, and what will require major paradigm shifts to accomplish?
I Have Everything to Hide
A typical retort to those who lament the loss of privacy in everyday life is, “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, then you should have nothing to hide.” No one’s perfect though, and we all have things we want to hide. That’s why most browsers, including Google Chrome, have some sort of stealth mode (or “porn mode”) that doesn’t record what you’re doing. Everyone can have legitimate reasons for keeping secrets. The point of privacy is to present people with choice: an individual should have the choice of whether or not to reveal his or her private information, right?
But what’s private to us? Well, if anonymity is your goal, then probably everything except a pseudonym, maybe your gender. The Internet is increasingly critical to offline applications, however, and anonymity is no longer always an option. Sure, it’s possible to establish an ephemeral blog with no personally-identifiable information available to the public. However, the site will record your computer’s IP address, which in turn can be traced back (in most cases) to you. Even if you use a public computer, you’ll probably have to give an email address that could be traced back to you—you could use a fake address, but then you‘d have no way of receiving legitimate communications.
As the Internet evolves, it begins connecting our offline personae with our online ones. No longer is the Internet just a network on which we push emails back and forth. Now we’re uploading videos, torrenting television programs, tweeting, blogging, using Facebook—much of this relying on our own offline identities to make it relevant. When I update my Twitter status, it shows up on Facebook and on the homepage of my website. People who want to know what I am doing can look at my status.
But if one is not careful, too much information can lead to problems. Put your credit card number in the wrong form, and suddenly someone has stolen your identity. These are real problems that we as a society are going to have to solve. We have to give our private data to someone, but to whom?
Sell Your Soul For a Fiddle
How do you decide if a website is trustworthy? Friends‘ reviews? Newspaper articles? The number of people on the site? Which services deserve to store our private information, and which ones are untrustworthy for one reason or another?
If you have a bank account, then you probably have access to your finances online. Your bank stores massive amounts of personal information about you from your name to your credit history. What makes a bank more trustworthy than Google? Companies often try to sell themselves by promoting how much experience they’ve had, how long they‘ve been around. My bank, Bank of Montreal, is Canada’s oldest bank, founded in 1817. That’s much older than Google, which will be celebrating its tenth birthday in three days! If age is a factor, then my bank must be a more appropriate institution to trust with my data.
Banks don’t have the best track record for keeping private information private, however. It seems like every couple of months there’s another article in the newspaper about one bank or another misplacing or accidentally leaking the private information of thousands of people. Whoa. When was the last time Google did that? In July there was some concern when a court ordered Google-owned YouTube to hand over some information to Viacom. YouTube’s handling of the situation seems to indicate that Google has our privacy on its mind. And that makes sense. Google is a business as much as banks are, and no business wants to become notorious for disclosing private data.
ScapeGoogle?
So when our data does get disclosed, who is to blame? In the case of accidental leaks, the company often hits the age-old tome of excuses to produce classics like, “The postal service lost the package containing the data,” or “An employee forgot to clean sensitive data off his or her thumb drive before giving it away.” We are all human1; we make mistakes.
If the court orders the company to share the information with a third party, then we blame the government. And this is an important point: even in so-called free societies, legislation exists that gives the government access to data you store with private companies. If the U.S. government demands that Google hand over some of its data, there is nothing much Google can do about it. Google’s lawyers can fight the case in court, sure, but in the end, if the government wins the case, then it’s not Google’s fault that the government has that power. That is the price Google pays for operating in such deprived countries, much like Google’s self-imposed censorship is the price it pays for operating in China.
Thanks to the networked nature of the Internet, this creates headaches for people who don’t even live in the United States. Any data you send to Google’s servers is going to end up at a machine located in the U.S. at some point, which makes it accessible to the U.S. government. Avoiding such an eventuality requires a great deal of effort2. So the options become just accept the inevitable or boycott Google and its ilk3
Let’s All Go Amish
Boycotting Google is an acceptable, if extreme, method of protecting one’s privacy. However, it is impractical to boycott every possible source of privacy infringement. I suppose that one could cut up one’s credit cards, debit cards, government-issued IDs, etc. There are people who do this—but they are not a majority. Most people accept that some level of compromise is required to keep up with the relentless march of technology.
Ah, now the real demon comes to light: technology is evil! Mmm … not so much. We could destroy all of our advanced technology, but that doesn’t eliminate our privacy concerns. Also, it would utterly wreck civilization as we know it—you can go ahead and claim that a more pastoral existence is the paradise humanity requires, but that’s beyond the scope of this entry. The reality is, we are dependent on our technology, and that dependence comes with a price.
Be careful with your private information, of course. You’re going to have to give it out eventually. Be frugal about to whom you give it out. Tools like Facebook are not inherently dangerous; it all comes down to how you use them4
If you really are bothered by how society treats privacy these days, then make noise. Don’t just blog ineffectually about it like I am—write a letter to your representative of government (if you live in a “democracy”), form activist groups, make T-shirts, make pies … whatever it takes. Fight for change.
Me, I’m more worried about tethered appliances (such as the iPhone) and companies having the ability to remotely terminate products we “buy” as opposed to the data on those devices. But that’s an issue for another day.
I surrender. Now stop sending me emails.
Great Bird of the Galaxy, forgive me.
It was just a matter of time, of course. My willpower is far from legendary or anything, and I knew that I was going to “cave”, as Cortney so eloquently puts it, sometime or another—I fully intended to, since once I‘m done high school I’d like to preserve my connections with my friends through whatever means available. And, as much as I hate to admit it, social networking sites help.
So I joined Facebook.
That’s right. I’m tired of those snarky little “I’ve added you as a friend on Facebook…” emails finding their way into my inbox, begging me to get an account. 
Fine. I surrender. Now stop sending me emails. (I have a feeling I‘m going to continue getting them anyway, since that’s the nature of the beast).
However, an interestingly paranoid Orwellian thought occurred to me. As our technology increases, the government institutes increasingly complex methods of keeping track of us. The day is not far off when some sort of “national ID” system will be implemented. We already have several numbers associated with us—driver’s licence, SIN, health card, etc. Naturally people start to get paranoid about the government having access to all our private information.
Yet most people have no problem giving out their private information to sites like Facebook. So this begs the question: what if a site, like Facebook, isn’t actually run by a private corporation? What if it’s a front for the government, a way of clandestinely gathering people’s private information? Someone in the government will eventually wake up and do this, if it isn’t already being done. It’s a great method of data-mining your citizens without their knowledge. After all, who are you going to trust? Facebook, or the government?
Facebook, obviously, because their lovely little “JOIN OUR SITE” emails means they care. So much. 
And they don’t charge you taxes, which I suppose contributes.
Note this well: I surrendered to Facebook. But I will never, ever join MySpace so long as there is a speck of breath left in this body. As far as I’m concerned, MySpace is still a scourge, a blight on the Internet, and its time will come. Until then, I’m just going to continue ignoring it and block all those idiots who try to hotlink my smilies.
