Brent Kearney

Is privacy becoming a passé topic in the new century? Government wiretapping, satelite spying, police video surveillance, RFID tags and GPS-enabled devices are proliferating, usually on the heels of arguments for crime and terrorism prevention. Web 2.0, the next generation of the world wide web, is quickly filling up with online replacements for your desktop applications, and more-open-than-ever communications software. Google and Yahoo! are taking the lead by either building their own online personal apps or by purchasing companies who already have. Google has created Gmail, the forthcoming Google Calendar, and has recently purchased the online word processor, Writely. Yahoo! purchased the extremely popular photo-sharing site, Flickr, as well as the pioneering social bookmarking site, del.icio.us, and has its own email and calendar services. People enter and discuss their personal goals and dreams on 43Things.com, manage their to-do lists on Backpack, and individuals and companies manage their projects with the online project manager, Basecamp. All of these services remove aspects of private lives from personal computers, and put them in the hands of either public companies or the public at large.

Granted, one need not use real names for any of these services, so that one can remain at least superficially anonymous. However, anyone with technical know-how and sufficient resources could probably put the pieces together to discover your real identity, if they were so inclined. In the real world, though, people use these services quite openly with their real names and fill them up with their real personal correspondence and so forth, so the anonymity issue is somewhat moot.

The relevant issue is — does anyone care? Do you? Even more pertinent — should anyone care?

There are strong arguments on either side. The recent media ruckus over the NSA wiretapping story in the United States is testament to the fact that privacy is still a big concern to many Americans. However, given the deep resentment that many of them have towards their current government, it is hard to say how many of the dissenters are actually just acting out of spite. One could argue that the stronger privacy laws that have been implemented in Canada and European nations is evidence for the concern that people have over privacy. Then again, the actions of states do not always reflect the attitudes of the majority of their citizens. Their actions as individuals, surely, speak louder than the words of their politicians.

On the opposite side of the issue, a strong case — and a hilarious one — is made by comedian Bill Maher, on his HBO show, Real Time:

http://www.funnypix.ca/d/3906-2/privacy.avi (~20MB)

Maher’s point is that people want attention far more than they want privacy, and that the security benefits of state monitoring outweigh privacy concerns by a great deal. He is speaking about, and for the most part on behalf of, Americans, but most western countries are loosely following suit when it comes to the rampant attention-getting schemes inherent in communications technologies.

The idea that state monitoring is an effective tool to combat terrorism is highly contentious. Skeptics argue that data mining would be ineffective due to the raw volume and randomness of communications data, that the number of false positives would both waste law enforcement resources and impinge on the rights of innocent citizens. The vast network of video cameras installed on the streets of England did nothing to prevent terrorist attacks on the London transit system; it seems that such technology is useful only after the fact. Identification systems, likewise, are useful forensic tools in the wake of a crime, but in the case of suicidal terrorists, surveillance is practically useless.

On the other hand, exactly how well do surveillance critics understand classified electronic snooping systems? Is it possible to gauge the effectiveness of a technology or system without a full understanding of it? Since signals intelligence is so highly secretive, we the public can’t have a full understanding of the programs and technologies in place. Maybe the number of false positives is actually quite tolerable, and relevant interceptions are commonplace and cost-effective. Critics opinions are based upon their understanding of how currently available public technology works, not the classified private systems in use by intelligence agencies.

Maybe the government shouldn’t be so secretive about their information gathering programs. It would certainly be easier to trust them if they were transparent about their activities (unless, of course, they are abusing their power!). In fact, with feedback from the public and the scientific community, monitoring systems would likely be improved, so that there are less false-positives and mistakes. The idea of openness is antithetical to the military mindset, however, so unless some radical government takes power and upsets the current paradigm, the public will likely remain in the dark.

Government snooping aside, privacy advocates also worry about industry and malicious private citizens. And with good reason: identity theft is a major issue today, and aggressive advertising such as spamming is clogging everyone’s inboxes. There have been tens of millions of victims of identity theft, and I’m sure that almost all of them thought, “it won’t happen to me.” Billions dollars have been lost, and a lot of personal hardship had due to identity theft crimes.

Many people believe that the solution to identity theft is to lock information up tight, hide your personal identity and become anonymous, and implement privacy policies that keep the world out of your life to the maximum extent possible. Or maybe it is this type of behavior which has created a world in which identity theft is rampant.

Consider a small town, before the Internet and sprawling cities, where everyone knows something about everyone else, either by association, reputation or by direct relationship. In that type of circumstance, identity theft is practically impossible, since personal identities are rarely if ever in question, and if they were, it would be easy to verify via trusted second opinions.

In such a town, there would be less personal privacy than one gets in a modern city. Gossip abounds, and people are nosy. However, because of that, I would guess that the townsfolk are less likely to behave in socially unacceptable ways. Like stealing each other’s things. On the down-side, in some towns, people could be encouraged to behave in socially unacceptable ways, like be racists. The big can of worms is the meaning of “socially acceptable”. So without going further astray from the main issue, privacy, I’ll leave the issue of social norms at that. The point of this paragraph is that when identity is not so much in question, there is probably a greater tendency towards good behavior. Maybe I’m wrong.

If I’m not, then it seems that some major problems could be solved by improving identification systems. Instead of people carrying around easily fake-able cards, or remembering passwords to identify themselves, bio-metric authentication is based on something that people are. Examples include retina-scans, finger print scans, hand geometry scans, DNA samples, or some combination of them.

It seems almost paradoxical that biometrics could be a solution to what many people view as a privacy problem. However, identity theft exploits the fact that peoples identities are unknown; if identities were more certain, then falsely assuming them would be much more difficult. If everyone knows you, it is much harder for criminals to “steal” your identity. However, in a world of millions of people behind computer screens connected to each other via networks of networks, how possible is it to achieve secure identification?

I would like to note that the possibility of anonymity is essential in a free and just society. It is not only important for whistle-blowers, exposing crimes or what have you, but it also engenders a certain sense of security and freedom that we should never give up.

Not finished this article yet … I will continue with Part II at a later date…

No comments

I had planned on integrating Gallery 2 into this blog, using the WordPress Gallery Plugin, but I had some difficulties installing Gallery2. There is a bug in PHP’s __FILE__ variable when used on FreeBSD, in my environment. Anyways it turned out well because I discovered Plogger, which I like better now anyways.

So I integrated Plogger with Wordpress, and it now appears embedded in my Photos page. In addition, I setup a Feedburner feed and called it a Photocast, since it appears to work as such in iPhoto fairly well. Any RSS feed would probably work this way, but some blogger somewhere had recommended it, so I thought I’d give it a try. Maybe it will save me some bandwidth too.

I may code my own photocast add-on to Plogger, since I know PHP fairly well and there seems to be adequate information on the web as to the hacks that Apple made to RSS for this feature. For now though, my Mac-using friends and family can enjoy automatic photo updates via the Feedburner link.

No comments