Foreshadowing Privacy Controversy

Electonic monitoring tactics, via personal computers, have been foreshadowed long before the current uproars and controversies concerning the N.S.A. and mass invasions of privacy. A 1985 publication, known as Whole Earth Review by Larry Hunter, contains the following quote from an article concerning the future of privacy:

"The ubiquity and power of the computer blur the distinction between public and private information. Our revolution will not be in gathering data — don’t look for TV cameras in your bedroom — but in analyzing information that is already willingly shared."

This highly prescient excerpt gives an uncanny window into the era which has been characterized by global utilization of social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.

"I live in the future. As a graduate student in Artificial Intelligence at Yale University, I am now using computer equipment that will be commonplace five years from now. I have a powerful workstation on my desk, connected in a high-speed network to more than one hundred other such machines, and, through other networks, to thousands of other computers and their users. I use these machines not only for research, but to keep my schedule, to write letters and articles, to read nationwide electronic “bulletin boards,” to send electronic mail, and sometimes just to play games. I make constant use of fancy graphics, text formatters, laser printers — you name it. My gadgets are both my desk and my window on the world. I’m quite lucky to have access to all these machines."

Part of what he reveals through his disclosures is a cautionary message to the readers:

"Without any conspiratorial snooping or Big Brother antics, we may find our actions, our lifestyles, and even our beliefs under increasing public scrutiny as we move into the information age."

He illustrates the vast number of methods by which corporations and governments will have the ability to monitor public behavior some years ahead. He give insight into the concept of bloc modelling and how this assists institutions in creating profiles that can be used for good or evil purposes. It seems likely that credit service companies starting to sell much more specific demographic info to credit card companies in the early 1980s would fall into the "evil" category.

"How does Citicorp know what your lifestyle is? How can they sell such information without your permission? The answer is simple: You’ve been giving out clues about yourself for years. Buying, working, socializing, and traveling are acts you do in public. Your lifestyle, income, education, home, and family are all deductible from existing records. The information that can be extracted from mundane records like your Visa or Mastercard receipts, phone bill, and credit record is all that’s needed to put together a remarkably complete picture of who you are, what you do, and even what you think."

Essentially, this is case and point that rather than invasive prying into the private lives of citizens, the citizens are willingly giving up their rights to privacy, unwittingly of course. It all must seem quite innocent to publish the coffee houses and restaurants which you happen to frequent on the World Wide Web, but that information is being sold to the companies that really want it. All this data, of course, can be used for good, or at least intriguing, strategies for creating illuminating pictures of the world.

"While the relationship between two people in an organization is rarely very informative by itself, when pairs of relationships are connected, patterns can be detected. The people being modeled are broken up into groups, or blocs. The assumption made by modelers is that people in similar positions behave similarly. Blocs aren’t tightly knit groups. You may never have heard of someone in your bloc, but because you both share a similar relationship with some third party you are lumped together. Your membership in a bloc might become the basis of a wide variety of judgements, from who gets job perks to who gets investigated by the FBI."

One of the questions Hunter answers in the article pertains to when private info is technically considered public. This is a complicated question to resolve considering how virtually everything that can be photographed IS photographed and published for public internet consumption.

"We live in a world of private and public acts. We consider what we do in our own bedrooms to be our own business; what we do on the street or in the supermarket is open for everyone to see. In the information age, our public acts disclose our private dispositions, even more than a camera in the bedroom would. This doesn’t necessarily mean we should bring a veil of secrecy over public acts. The vast amount of public information both serves and endangers us."

He discusses the challeges in attempting to control and police how this information can be used. He uses a metaphor by Jerry Samet, a Professor of Philosophy at Bentley College who explained that while people consider an invasion of privacy to peer into the window of their homes from outside (ala, Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window", but on the other hand, there is no apparent harm in looking out onto the street to view people inhabiting "their public lives". This is an important distinction which should be considered.

"Why not make gathering this information against the law? Think of Samet’s metaphor: do we really want to ban looking out the window? The information about groups and individuals that is public is public for a reason. Being able to write down what I see is fundamental to freedom of expression and belief, the freedoms we are trying to protect. Furthermore, public records serve us in very specific, important ways. We can have and use credit because credit records are kept. Supermarkets must keep track of their inventories, and since their customers prefer that they accept checks, they keep information on the financial status of people who shop in their store. In short, keeping and using the kind of data that can be turned into personal profiles is fundamental to our way of life — we cannot stop gathering this information."

If we give up a huge amount of info to Twitter, or another social networking site for a free communications service, or to American Express for the luxury of making payments by credit card, what can we reasonably protect? Hunter provides a solution which seems thoughtful as well as reasonable, yet naive considering he had yet to see the full extent of how some of his predictions would truly manifest themselves.

"People under scrutiny ought to be able to exert some control over what other people do with that personal information. Our society grants individuals control over the activities of others primarily through the idea of property. A reasonable way to give individuals control over information about them is to vest them with a property interest in that information. Information about me is, in part, my property. Other people may, of course, also have an interest in that information. Citibank has some legitimate interests in the information about me that it has gathered. When my neighbor writes down that I was wearing a red sweater, both of us should share in the ownership of that information."

Hauntingly, Hunter foresaw some of our most dire concerns when Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t yet even 1 year old:

"Soon celebrities and politicians will not be the only ones who have public images but no private lives — it will be all of us. We must take control of the information about ourselves. We should own our personal profiles, not be bought and sold by them."