What's Missing?

An intelligence officer at Columbia put a simple proposition to the audience. The State is offering you security from terrorism and all it’s asking you to give up is a smidgen of privacy, what a bargain! Private technology companies say “here is a free service and will use your data to customize your experience, no catch!”. The “catch” is disguised by the characterization of the privacy debate as a singular transaction. Privacy is environmental. The transaction occurs incrementally and has long-term effects. In short, it is the surrender of power by individuals to corporations and government in the form of information. This long-term view is missing from the current debate.

People unconcerned by private companies holding data often characterize the use of that data as innocuous. A typical response is “Facebook tried to sell me something I bought three weeks ago” or “I’ll just ignore the ads”. It is true that current online advertising is unsophisticated, however, this presumes it will not improve. Tech companies are regularly experimenting on how to predict human behavior. The Artificial Intelligence crunching the numbers is improving.

The risk is that with exponential improvement the business will be able to take full advantage of the asymmetry of information between consumers and corporations.

Computers can through browsing data identify our unconscious preferences. They can already identify users that are pregnant before they know, and users whose relationships are in trouble before the users know.

The data has two advantages. It can be used to advertise a product to a person right at the time they can buy it. Moreover, differential pricing can be applied to individuals. This is the entire aim of Amazon. Accumulate years of consumer data and use it to calculate what an individual wants and what that individual will pay.

Put this way, suppose you enter a liquor store with no fixed price, undecided if you will make a purchase. Do you want the owner to know you have a weakness for whiskey? Do you want the owner to know that you have a $150 and best on previous behavior you are likely to spend it all? The loss of privacy undermines the power of the individual.

Another example is employment. Today we choose how to market ourselves to employers. Tired of job and your town? Hop a plane, cross the country, exaggerate your CV and pitch the new you to employers.

If employers can access information from data aggregation companies, or through simple Google searches, the opportunity for the individual to reinvent herself is lost. Moreover, a combination of education data and credit history allows employers to offer as low a salary as possible.

In each example the problem is the same, the corporation knows more about us than we know about it, or in some cases ourselves.

The same can be said about the trade-off in the security context. Recently, the Australian Government introduced a meta-data retention scheme. It was justified by the need to fight terrorism and child pornography. Internet Service Providers (ISP) will hold the data for two years that can be accessed by authorities in an investigation of any crime.

This has been characterized as a simple trade off, a small amount of privacy for security. The law, coupled with increasing technological sophistication, could radically alter the power between law enforcement and citizens.

First, the ability of the authorities to use meta-data for any crime, may lead us to a “total enforcement state”. The police can enforce any law because physical limitations are removed. Metadata revealing online spending habits higher than reported income could allow low-level drug dealers to be targeted. Police could identify drug addicts by looking at users that that browse for health ailments commonly associated drug use. Facial recognition technology could enable the arrest of anyone with outstanding speeding tickets who attends a ball game. Tracking movements, interactions, and browsing could allow a state to identify individual’s sexuality.

Enhanced enforcement can undermine the community’s capacity to drive social change through low-level law breaking. For example, a huge number of Americans used cannabis in there 20s. These citizens have seen the cost of cannabis enforcement, but know from personal experience authorities over-state the risks of cannabis. The result: a dimming of popular support for the war on drugs. Further, homosexuality survived because people could do it in secret.

The consequences would be a loss of citizens to test the value of laws ourselves and to experiment with different lifestyles and ways of living not sanctioned. Instead the Government able, if it wishes, can enforce conformity.

Secondly, the use of meta-data could lead to the policing of people based on how they think, not what they do. As stated above, patterns of browsing can reveal sub-conscience thoughts and desires.

Suppose the authorities identified a pattern in the browsing data of persons before they commit a terrorist attack. The pattern may be that they google ISIS, or that they simply check Facebook more incessantly, or that their browsing becomes more frenetic. Once identified, who could object to the Government checking every users browsing to identify who “thinks” like a terrorist? So long as you do not think like a criminal (however it is they think) you have nothing to hide.

This is the other fundamental change, the capacity for the state to surveil thoughts. An oppressive state could identify suspected homosexuals, terrorists, or dissidents before they commit any positive acts.

This is not a basic exchange of data to allow the Government to check whose calling ISIS.

The trade off between privacy and security is not simple. The trade offs security agencies and private companies invite us to make will change the society we live in. Combined with advances in technology they have the potential to make citizens far less able to exercise agency in the commercial or political sphere.

No wonder Facebook nor the NSA put this in big bold letters in the agreement. Instead they just ask to click and move on.