Yeah, somebody is looking - should you care?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, privacy, surveys

At a very early age we learn that the things people like and dislike differ. We learn that what some approve, others disapprove. When we find that what we like—any object, food, behavior, hobby, or whatever—is disliked or disapproved by someone who is powerful, or by large numbers of others we must spend time with, we begin to keep secrets. I remember, in second grade, excitedly telling a classmate of something I saw while watching The Mickey Mouse Club on TV. He said, scornfully, "That's for two-year-olds!" After that I never disclosed that I continued to watch the show.

I didn't have that episode in mind when I began to read Privacy: What Everyone Needs to Know^® by Leslie P. Francis and John G. Francis (Nowhere in the book could I find why the subtitle is trademarked). I was simply interested in the subject, one so very popular today. Once I dug in, I found the ride rather difficult. Why?

The authors write well, but the subject is difficult. It is also so broad and all-pervasive that no treatise containing a mere 100,000 words can do more than touch on its many facets. Thus the book is composed of a few paragraphs each about some 130 topics, grouped into 10 chapters. It is actually a pretty good ontology of the subject to two levels. But it is a resource or reference, and don't think it is intended to be read through. So I treated it as such, reading the opening section of each chapter, and then dipping into topics that most interested me. My interests are rather broad, so I still read through a lot of the book, but this is my disclaimer that I did not read every word.

The older I become, the more I realize how exceedingly diverse the human race is. I suspect that for  every choice I make, were I to broadcast it on FaceBook and invite comment, someone would object or blame or scold me for it. In America, at least (and how often do I consider whether it is really OK to write "America" to mean the United States of America, rather than using "The U.S" or some other locution and thus avoid slighting the other 20 or 21 nations that constitute The Americas?), the climate of Political Correctness that has been a-building for some 50 years makes us all paranoid about "offending" a nation full of hair-triggered people.

A side note here, folks: Political Correctness has become a pervasive form of Censorship, and all the idiots out there who moan or scream, "Oh, I am so offended!" a few dozen times a day really need to find a more productive hobby, and grow a useful thickness of skin. So there.

OK, I'm back. Given the current cultural climate, a strong dose of paranoia is entirely justified. You can get shot at for honking your horn at the wrong time. Nobody accepts an apology if they think they can wring out an abject apology or even get you fired. American culture as it now stands constitutes an assault on the privacy of our own thoughts.

The subject of the novel 1984 was pervasive surveillance by the State. These days, that is just the beginning of our worries. My computer-jock colleagues and I used to joke that, if a company like Seagate were to develop a hard disk with infinite capacity, the government would order two of them. To me and my colleagues in the 1980's, a disk drive holding a few hundred Mbytes was a big (and costly) device. Now for $50 I can get a pocket-size Tbyte or two (and I have an "old" 2-Tbyte drive; it is as big as the book I just read). The big data center the NSA keeps in the Utah desert has a capacity of millions of Tbytes (the unit is called an Exabyte, or Xbyte). But it is not just the government. Data-hungry commercial enterprises store similar quantities of data…about us. About you and me, their customers (or critics, or whatever we are to them). George Orwell might be astonished, or he might say, "Why didn't I think of that?" And just you wait: Moore's Law for storage devices isn't slowing down yet, so a pocket Xbyte for $50 or so is probably just a few years away. And with network speeds pushing Gbyte/sec speeds and beyond, plus cameras everywhere, just everywhere, we live in a social surveillance environment. The primary difference between you and me, and the big actors—governments and large corporations—is that they can afford to employ programmers to write software to actually sort, scan, and analyze these massive data stores and create useful intelligence.

Is privacy dead? The authors, the Francises, don't think so. But many aspects of privacy are indeed dead. They are about to get deader. Some things are still humorous. If I neglect to go into InPrivate mode when I search for products and product reviews, or when I buy what I've researched, I'll see ads for such products appearing in all kinds of places for the following several months, in spite of the fact that I already bought it. But I fully expect the day to come that Google and FaceBook and everybody will know I bought it, and the ads will instead target follow-ons. If I begin using cooking or recipe web sites a lot, will the sudden up-tick trigger ads for cookware and blenders and spatulas and toaster ovens? Maybe. And after a couple more years, "they" will likely know I am thinking about upgrading my kitchen range before I even begin my research.

What is there, in your life, that you most keenly desire to be known to nobody, but nobody, except perhaps your partner? What if your pattern of purchases—even if you never, ever buy anything online—reveals your deepest secret to "somebody" whom you'd rather didn't know it? Or, if not purchases, just the streets you drive down or walk along, tracked by the phone in your pocket? What if the traces of DNA you leave on the paper from the table in the doctor's exam room lead to a pre-diagnosis of an embarrassing or dangerous condition you didn't know you were prone to having? … but that information somehow made it to your insurance company before you even knew it? Will technology eventually make it an almost all-revealing act to simply walk through a certain doorway while breathing? Yet you have no idea which doorway it might be? The current trend in DNA sequencing can be projected to the point where doing a total genome sequence will cost a dollar. Then what? Do you really want to know you might not have the same Y chromosome as your "father"? Or your…son?

The last chapter, the final 10 vignettes of the book, consider privacy and democracy. How much secrecy is required for a democracy to function? Conversely, how much transparency is also required? (Would it change your vote to learn that a certain political candidate has a large collection of antique torture devices? or reads 2-3 romance novels every single week (or writes one every 2 months)? or never buys meat, preferring to shoot it personally? or has raw eggs for breakfast every day? or is a total Vegan? Come up with your own list.) We have had a society that functioned, oh, reasonably well, having a certain mix of privacy and transparency. That mix is being forcibly shifted. Like it or not, more transparency is in our future. And the PC culture is accompanied by a trend that asks, "If you are so hell-bent on privacy, what're you trying to hide?"

I, for one, am glad that I have reached curmudgeonhood and will not likely live long enough to see, for example, the $1 genome sequence. There is a point beyond which we can no longer adapt. I am an introvert, with no more than the average amount of paranoia (so I tell myself - 😁!). I'd hate to be pushed until I "go postal" just because of societal nosiness. It is not entirely out of the question, folks. How about you?

So hey, that was a bunch of good riffs from a book that does no more than discuss a hundred-odd questions we will find ourselves asking more and more in the years ahead. Read it only if you can withstand a boost to your paranoia quotient!