Another PRISM Post
Let’s get Personal
It seems that everyone and their mother is giving their two cents regarding the recent revelations that the NSA is gathering information from internet companies. Already, action is being taken. Most are simply expressing their outrage and disbelief, while some are filing lawsuits and are ready to help the whistleblower achieve asylum. Many are already playing the blame game. Is it the government for over extending its hand, or is the internet company for allowing (whether through an open and unlimited channel or not) the government access to its data? Many of the critics argue that our collective trust in technology and the government will take an unrepairable hit, yet a recent study showed that most Americans are okay with the access of phone records.
Ownership
I think this issue boils down to ownernship. Who actually owns the phone records, the search queries, and the status updates? There does not seem to be a fully straightforward answer. We do the writing, and we do the calling. Yet, the information is stored with the internet companies. Hence, technically, the internet companies own the information, but we felt that our privacy was invaded when we heard of PRISM.
The issue of digital ownership is a new realm, especially with the advent of cloud technology. Cloud technology, which includes products such as Google Search, Facebook, and Box, provides the ease of having your (or the company’s) information accessable on any device from anywhere. It seems to a tradeoff between ownership and convencience, and it seems harder and harder to forego the convenience.
After all, we do not pay, at least monetarily for these services. These companies are not like physical storage companies, where only you have the key to the storage locks. All the information is stored together and replicated across multiple data centers in various locations. Hence, this idea of owning of our Facebook statuses exemplifies the conflict between an old social construct of ownership and new technologies.
What Next
I do not think an alternative model will spring up to overtake the current leaders in the cloud industry. There are companies that are trying to sell people the idea that the information on the servers is in fact the people’s, but they lack in usership, quality, and have a paywall. Hence, companies, whether Facebook or Google+, will continue to use the free to use model and take advantage of user information by improving their products and targeting better ads.
I also do not think that the NSA will really scale back in their attempts to gather all the data that they can. Congress and the President will not show any interest in creating legislation that will pull back the powers of the NSA, as they have seen the power of “big data” and the secrets that it can unfold.
Finally, I do not think that the average person will suddenly stop using all the wonderful services on the internet because of fear that they are being watched. The internet companies provide far too much convenience for people to stop using them to avoid the small chance that they are targeted. In fact, many of them don’t even understand the privacy settings and have a great deal of their (the company’s?) information public anyways.
Now, I’m not saying that the status quo is perfectly fine, and I’m not saying that no action can be taken. I think the most practical solution to this problem is to set up legislation to have the information that the internet companies provide to governments to be obfuscated in some way. In other words, the government could receive hashed ids rather than actual names for all the information they receive, such that they can not just target Americans on a whim. When the government feels there is a legitimate threat, which admittedly i have no idea how to assess, they can then ask the internet company with a warrant for the user’s name and other redacted personal information. In my mind, this solution allows the NSA to cleverly seek out threats that could not be seen before while preventing abuse of such power.
