On the Privacy Front

In January, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg declared the age of privacy to be over. A month earlier, Google Chief Eric Schmidt expressed a similar sentiment. Add Scott McNealy’s and Larry Ellison’s comments from a few years earlier, and you’ve got a whole lot of tech CEOs proclaiming the death of privacy — especially when it comes to young people. … The very companies whose CEOs eulogize privacy make their money by controlling vast amounts of their users’ information. Whether through targeted advertising, cross-selling or simply convincing their users to spend more time on their site and sign up their friends, more information shared in more ways, more publicly means more profits. This means these companies are motivated to continually ratchet down the privacy of their services, while at the same time pronouncing privacy erosions as inevitable and giving users the illusion of control. -Schneier on Security

We continue to become more deeply enmeshed in a web of devices that can figure out who we are, who our friends are, what we’re doing, and why we’re doing it. It’s not just a loss of secrecy, it’s a loss of control.

Privacy is about control. When your health records are sold to a pharmaceutical company without your permission; when a social-networking site changes your privacy settings to make what used to be visible only to your friends visible to everyone; when the NSA eavesdrops on everyone’s e-mail conversations — your loss of control over that information is the issue. We may not mind sharing our personal lives and thoughts, but we want to control how, where and with whom. A privacy failure is a control failure.

To make the point in a different way:

We do not own our networks. In January 2008, blogger Robert Scoble automatically harvested the names and email addresses of his several thousand Facebook friends, and exported them to another account. The row was resolved amicably in the end—but the outcome was that Scoble’s network was not his to harvest. -ACM

So, in the end, information about us that is collected by someone else doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to whoever collected it in the first place. And the collection of information about us is getting downright scary. The tracking of people directly has already started.

Rockhill Mennonite Community, a continuing-care retirement compound located in Sellersville, Penn., has adopted a real-time location system (RTLS) enabling management to know when residents require assistance, to know where patients and workers are located at any given time, and to trace back the care residents have received, and the activities in which they participated. It also allows staff members to receive an alert when residents may be straying toward an area considered off-limits, such as an exit. -RFID Journal

Who will fix this problem? It’s easy to say “the government should pass this law or that law…” But the reality is the government doesn’t want to discourage this sort of monitoring. In fact, if anything, the government wants to encourage such monitoring, given it has access to the databases thus gathered when and where it wants them. While this might be hard to swallow, the reality is we, as individuals must learn to take responsibility. There was a time when you could “expect” privacy, but those days are gone.

Instead, we need to learn to take proactive action to protect our privacy, even if that means we must pay a bit more, or deal with a little inconvenience.