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Computers, Privacy & the Constitution
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Convenience at the Cost of Our Privacy-- By JingWang - 11 Mar 2022 The internet knows more about us than anyone else in the world. Through data provided by us, it knows where we live and our education background; by observing our online behaviors, it knows what contents we feel the most passionate about; by making inferences through automated decision-making and profiling, it knows who we consider the closest friends and even the ideologies we believe in but have never told anyone about. Through these comprehensive data, social media platforms build their ad targeting mechanisms to present us the products that we are most likely to purchase and collect enormous profit from selling the avenues to customers to vendors. As people are becoming more informed about how targeted-ads work, the awareness of protecting data privacy has also gradually increased. Notably, when I watched Mark Zuckerberg’s Cambridge Analytica senate hearing on YouTube? in 2018, most of the comments were critical of senators’ scrutinization of Facebook’s privacy policy—worrying that more regulations would hinder technology developments. Fast-forwarding to the present day, people are more skeptical of tech giant’s data-collecting mechanisms, especially when there seems to be a compromise of information conveyed in private settings: many wonder how, after merely mentioning the potential to make a purchase in a private conversation, they are targeted by the exact product mentioned. In a podcast episode by Gimlet Media, Is Facebook Spying on You, the host attempted to create a way which Facebook does not have to actively listen on users. The host’s attempt was proven futile as none of the listeners who called in believed that Facebook can use conventional data-collecting mechanisms (such as using provided, observed, or inferred data) to achieve the same end—the preciseness of the ads has to be the result of active listening. In the end, the host attributed users’ current distrust of big techs to their lack of transparency: users never got a clear answer from Facebook about how exactly their data are collected.Distrust Does Not Transfer to AbandonmentHowever, even though people are now aware of technologies’ intrusions on their data privacy, their distrust hasn’t transferred to willingness to abandon the convenience technologies provide. I categorize myself as one that values privacy—I private all my social media profiles so that my posts are only seen by people I’ve given access to. I do not give permission to websites to track my browsing behaviors and delete my search histories regularly. I do not allow apps on my phone to track my location unless when it is absolutely necessary. On the other hand, I am a hypocrite: I use Alexa while being well aware that it is monitoring all my conversations I have at home. Frankly, I don’t get a lot of use out of the device: it saves me 15 seconds from walking across the room to turn on my lamp and saves me less than 5 seconds from going into my weather app to check temperature. The usage I get out of the device versus the information it collects from me are not symmetrical, but I still chose to use it for the little convenience I receive. I am not alone. Platforms like Facebook has a comprehensive understanding of us because we can save a few minutes when setting up a new account if we directly link it to our Facebook profile. We constantly ask shopping sites to remember our information so that the checkout process will be faster in the future. And I bet a lot of people appreciate the “Don’t Forget These” remainders that pop up as they conclude their Amazon Fresh purchases. Technology companies see right through us: we are willing to give up privacy for the sake of convenience even when being left in the dark about how our data are used. And their appetite has grown bigger. Clear is an identity verification company that provides expedited security checking service for subscribers. Instead of waiting in security lines for a TSA staff to manually verify your identity, you can skip the line and use your biometric data such as face, iris, or fingerprints for the verification. Clear’s ambition did not stop at airports; biometric payments and healthcare are Clear’s next destination. Scholars have warned the catastrophic consequences of a security breach if it happens to companies like Clear. Unlike passwords and usernames, our biometric traits can never be changed. Are people scared? Not according to data: currently over 5.6 million Americans are enrolled in the subscription. They are willing to pay as much as $179 a year to move faster at airports, while at the same time providing the company with the most valuable information there is about themselves.Where Does It Stop?During the COVID-19 pandemic, China rolled out a contact tracing system that is different from other countries’: if you entered a location where positive patients were found, you are identified as a potential threat; it is irrelevant if the patient remained on the 20th floor and you have only been to the ground floor for a brief moment. Knowing this, my mom left her phone at home when she visited relatives in another province for lunar new year, fearing that bypassing region where patients are found later will disturb her normal daily activities (anyone who is marked as potentially-exposed need to quarantine in a hotel for at least 14 days). If you can’t track my phone, then you can’t track me. Perhaps the demise of convenience has to predate the end of abusive data collection. But it doesn’t seem to be possible any time soon. We are too indulged in knowing that a few minutes here and there are saved, that we can connect to friends on other continents, and that endless short videos we can laugh at are just a few clicks away. Perhaps only a catastrophic data leak incident that compromises what we value more can be the wakeup call. But until then, convenience rules the day.I think the best route to the improvement of the essay is to reconsider the "all or nothing" analysis of the services technology that is implicit in the current draft. As I have been discussing in this phase of the course, once one has a clear sense of the difficulties posed by technologies that offer trivial services at the expense of monitoring personal data, one can decide how to shape your tech for yourself. If a better endpoint than a smartphone combined with a tiny single-board computer costing a fraction of the price of a phone can do for you what the Google cloud or iCloud does for you—email, calendar, music streaming and photo sharing, secure chat, video conferencing, etc. is it worth learning or paying someone to set it up for you? Maybe you then feel you still need to carry a smartassphone, but you use it more securely by having a real VPN and proxy browsing, both, through that FreedomBox sitting at home (or, for that matter, on another continent). And you edcide whether or not to keep that Alexa, knowing that one week after you pull it out you;'ll never miss it again. In other words, once it's no longer everything or nothing, you know that another future is possible and freedom begins. The essay can then explore which trade-offs you do and don't want to make, and why, once more flexible ideas for using technology put the controls back in your hands. You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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