Privacy No More
Who is watching you? And why are They watching?
One profound difference between living today and living at any other point in history is the degree to which Others have their eyes on you. Google reads and sells information from your email. Facebook reads and sells information from you feed. Your grocery store sells information about what foods you buy.
They are watching. Big companies. The Government. They are watching what you do and analyzing your choices, trying to predict what you are thinking and feeling. They want to know where you are. They want to know who you are. They want to know what you intend to do. And They want to influence it.
In many cases our privacy is not stolen from us. We give it away. In exchange for convenience or for free services many of us trade our personal info. But most of us are unaware of the extent to which this info is then traded between companies and government agencies to create elaborate profiles of our consumer behavior or political views.
Here are five articles worth reading to give you a better idea of the state of your privacy today, and my own reflections follow at the end.
Read wisely. Read widely.
Max
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If You’re Not Paranoid, You’re Crazy
by Walter Kirn in The Atlantic
(25 minute read) || Article Link
my headline: Some articles are both a joy to read because they are so well written and yet simultaneously unnerving because they reveal an uncomfortable reality. This is one of those articles. My highest recommendation of the week (thanks Christian B). Read this one.
the gist: The author and a friend pay a visit to the NSA’s Utah Data Center. In telling the story of his unsettling experiences of being followed, both by the government and by his consumer electronics, you can’t help but get a creepy feeling about who’s watching you.
nuggets:
Everything about the data center was classified, but reports had leaked out that hinted at the magnitude of its operations. Aerial photos on the Web showed a complex of slablike concrete buildings arrayed in a crescent on a broad, bare hillside. The center was said to require enough power to supply a city of tens of thousands of people. The cooling plants designed to keep its servers from overheating and melting down would consume fantastic quantities of water — almost 2 million gallons a day when fully operational, I’d read — pumped from a nearby reservoir.
What couldn’t be conveyed by such statistics was the potency of the center’s digital nucleus. How much information could it hold, organize, screen, and, if called upon, decrypt? According to experts such as William Binney, a government whistle-blower and former top NSA cryptologist, the answer was simple: almost everything, today, tomorrow, and for decades to come. The data center, understood poetically (and how better to understand an object both unprecedented and impenetrable?), was as close as humanity had come to putting infinity in a box.
I knew that many of my fellow citizens took comfort in their own banality: You live a boring life and feel you have nothing to fear from those on high. But how could you anticipate the ways in which insights bred of spying might prove handy to some future regime? New tools have a way of breeding new abuses. Detailed logs of behaviors that I found tame — my Amazon purchases, my online comments, and even my meanderings through the physical world, collected by biometric scanners, say, or license-plate readers on police cars — might someday be read in a hundred different ways by powers whose purposes I couldn’t fathom now.
First Computers Recognized Our Faces, Now They Know What We’re Doing
by Rich McCormick in The Verge
(5 minute read) || Article Link
my headline: I don’t know how to define artificial intelligence, but this sounds close.
the gist: Google engineers and professors at Stanford have come developed code that allows a computer to “look” at an image, analyze it, and then write an accurate sentence describing the image (even if the computer is given no other information about the photo than the image itself).
nugget:
“First published last year, the program and the accompanying study is the work of Fei-Fei Li, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Andrej Karpathy, a graduate student. Their software is capable of looking at pictures of complex scenes and identifying exactly what’s happening. A picture of a man in a black shirt playing guitar, for example, is picked out as “man in black shirt is playing guitar,” while pictures of a black-and-white dog jumping over a bar, a man in a blue wetsuit surfing a wave, and little girl eating cake are also correctly described with a single sentence. In several cases, it’s unnervingly accurate.”
What Searchable Speech Will Do to You
by James Somers in Nautilus
(19 minute read) || Article Link
my summary: Instead of writing my own summary, I’m just going to share the first three paragraphs of this incredible piece with you. This is another that is well worth the read.
the nugget:
“We are going to start recording and automatically transcribing most of what we say. Instead of evaporating into memory, words spoken aloud will calcify as text, into a Record that will be referenced, searched, and mined. It will happen by our standard combination of willing and allowing. It will happen because it can. It will happen sooner than we think.
It will make incredible things possible. Think of all the reasons that you search through your email. Suddenly your own speech will be available in just the same way. “Show me all conversations with Michael before January of last year … What was the address of that restaurant Mum recommended? … When was the first time I mentioned Rob’s now-wife? … Who was at that meeting again?” Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University and a co-author of a forthcoming book on evolutionary psychology, has speculated that we might all get in the habit of peppering our speech with keywords, to help us look it up later. Or, while you’re talking, a software agent could search your old conversations for relevant material. Details would come to your attention at just the moment that you needed them.
Much of what is said aloud would be published and made part of the Web. An unfathomable mass of expertise, opinion, wit, and culture — now lost — would be as accessible as any article or comment thread is today. You could, at any time, listen in on airline pilots, on barbershops, on grad-school bull sessions. You could search every mention of your company’s name. You could read stories told by father to son, or explanations from colleague to colleague. People would become Internet-famous for being good conversationalists. The Record would be mined by advertisers, lawyers, academics. The sheer number of words available for sifting and savoring would explode — simply because people talk a lot more than they write.”
We Are Data: The Future of Machine Intelligence
by Douglas Coupland for FT Magazine
(17 minute read) || Article Link
my notes: Coupland is the “Artist in Residence” at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris, which is an interesting fact to know when you read this essay about his predictions that Google and services like it will eventually make human beings irrelevant except as consumers.
the gist: Coupland creates a hypothetical app “Wonkr” to analyze all your political beliefs, and in so doing shows us the definition of “Artificial Intuition.” He gets into what it means to have a free internet and how eventually everything you do online will not only be known, it will be public.
nuggets:
“Artificial Intuition happens when a computer and its software look at data and analyse it using computation that mimics human intuition at the deepest levels: language, hierarchical thinking — even spiritual and religious thinking. The machines doing the thinking are deliberately designed to replicate human neural networks, and connected together form even larger artificial neural networks. It sounds scary . . . and maybe it is (or maybe it isn’t). But it’s happening now. In fact, it is accelerating at an astonishing clip, and it’s the true and definite and undeniable human future…
…At the moment, Artificial Intuition is just you and the Cloud doing a little dance with a few simple algorithms. But everyone’s dance with the Cloud will shortly be happening together in a cosmic cyber ballroom, and everyone’s data stream will be communicating with everyone else’s and they’ll be talking about you: what did you buy today? What did you drink, ingest, excrete, inhale, view, unfriend, read, lean towards, reject, talk to, smile at, get nostalgic about, get angry about, link to, like or get off on?
Tie these quotidian data hits within the longer time framework matrices of Wonkr, Believr, Grindr, Tinder et al, and
suddenly you as a person, and you as a group of people, become something that’s humblingly easy to predict, please, anticipate, forecast and replicate.
Tie this new machine intelligence realm in with some smart 3D graphics that have captured your body metrics and likeness, and a few years down the road youbecome sort of beside the point. There will, at some point, be a dematerialised, duplicate you. While this seems sort of horrifying in a Stepford Wife-y kind of way, the difference is that instead of killing you, your replicant meta-entity, your synthetic doppelgänger will merely try to convince you to buy a piqué-knit polo shirt in tones flattering to your skin at Abercrombie & Fitch.
In a Cameras Everywhere Culture, Science Fiction Becomes Reality
by Tracey Lien and Paresh Dave for The Los Angeles Times
(6 minute read) || Article Link
my summary: lots of good facts here about the state of surveillance today and what some companies are doing to try to capitalize on information about you.
the gist: “Science fiction writer David Brin calls it “a tsunami of lights” — a future where tiny cameras are everywhere, lighting up everything we do, and even predicting what we’ll do next.” This piece is about all the video camera technology that exists and the innovations around the corner.
nuggets:
- There are 245 million surveillance cameras installed worldwide, according to research firm IHS, and the number increases by 15% a year.
- Surveillance technologies are evolving in fascinating ways. Google researchers are developing a camera small enough to fit on a contact lens.
- Another company, Bounce Imaging, is manufacturing a throwable camera shaped like a ball, with police departments as the target customer. The omni-directional cameras can literally take pictures on the fly and instantly transmit pictures to a smartphone.
postscript
Unsettling. That’s the word I’d use to describe how I feel after reading about all of this. On the subway home last night I was thinking about all of these things and feeling unsettled and I wondered why it disturbs me. Why does it it feel creepy that some computer is tracking us and analyzing what we’re doing?
The subway clacked down the tracks and my mind drifted to a story a professor told me about Immanuel Kant. Apparently Kant was not only a rigorous thinker, but every part of his life was systematic and regimented. Every day without fail at precisely half past three he would go for a walk up and down his street four times and clack his rattan cane along the pickets of the neighbors fence.
Kant had this idea of “a kingdom of ends,” an ideal and hypothetical state where every person is treated as an end in himself, and never simply as a means to an end for someone else. People should never be simply instruments to fulfill someone else’s selfish goals. Human dignity, he would say, requires this.
The more I think about it, the more I think my discomfort with surveillance and digital life tracking is simply about that: I feel like I am being used rather than respected. I feel like I’m being treated as a means rather than as a kingdom of ends. I believe I am and I yearn to be more than a of analytical collection point in some data farm. I am not just an algorithm. I am a man.
But what do we do? I feel unsettled, but on the other hand, I’m not planning to stop using gmail or my cell phone or the dozens of apps I have. I live in New York City and don’t plan to move to Montana. Moreover, I don’t plan to stop publishing my thoughts online like this, though I know that every word choice and topic will be dissected in ways I can’t predict. I do intend to be more thoughtful about what technology I am using when and what the tradeoffs are. Any decision I make to step into the digital stream, I will make with eyes wide open.
The other reflection I have is religious. One of the main ideas about God is omniscience. If there is a God, then He knows everything, including everything about us — everything we do, everywhere we go, everything we think or intend. If this is the state of affairs, the natural fear of course is judgment. How will my life be judged?
Most people find this uncomfortable. I do too. The reason is that I don’t even follow my own code well. There are things I think and believe are the right way to live, things that no one else, not even God tried to foist on me. Never mind the even higher standards I think I’m called to like “love your enemy,” I constantly fail to live consistently even with my own self-created principles.
The prospect of a corporation or the government taking a God-like account of all my actions is unsettling because I don’t trust them to play God well. How could they, the people designing the systems and making the decisions about how to use the information are probably just as flawed as I am, subject to their own indiscretions and failures to keep their own moral codes.
It’s likely that in the future, we will all have less privacy rather than more. I don’t really see how that trend changes, but would love to hear of ideas about how it might — especially ones that don’t involve wearing aluminum suits and living in underground bunkers.
As I got off the subway, I was reminded of another story. There’s this story of Jesus encountering a woman drawing water from a well. In the course of the conversation, it becomes clear that though they’ve never met, he knows everything about her, including the five husbands she has had. What’s interesting is that the woman is not creeped out by this in the way she would be creeped out if her Facebook stream showed advertisements for a divorce lawyer for husband number 6. Instead she senses compassion. Everyone else around her knew part of the story and judged her. He seemed to know the whole story, but accepted her.
This, in essence, is the desire I feel: not just to be left in private, but to be known and not condemned.
Have a good weekend. Enjoy your coffee.
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