Fending Off Goliath

Myth or fact? Both the Internet and the World Wide Web (hereinafter jointly referred as the “Net”) constitute a powerful tool of freedom and expression: fact. Whether for the greater good of a selected few or the demise of the remaining ‘others’, the Net does constitute a powerful tool of freedom and expression. But if we were to strike the words “freedom” and “expression” out of that phrase, we would be left with just “a powerful tool”. And as a powerful tool, it can be used for good or evil. Some evils we can control, others we cannot. Or can we?

As previously stated, the Net is not without caveats. First off, it is now generally accepted that the way the Net is being commercially used constitutes a threat to privacy. Now, more than ever, the concept of privacy has been eroded to the point where it admits no precise definition. For quite sometime, for example, browser cookies have been used by companies, among other purposes, to monitor customer-browsing habits, to conduct target advertising and pinpoint consumer preferences;

This seems to me overstated, for reasons I worked out at length in class. The cookie is a technical approach to working around the "stateless" structure of the Web. Because the cookie is saved on the browser side, its presentation is under the user's control. How much state the user wants to preserve is then up to her. What is really at stake is the poor quality of the tools users are given to enforce their choices. This is why free software browsers and other tools are so important: the user's tools should not be framed by the profit motive of someone else.

popular websites are now requiring users to use their real names, under the threat of being blocked, for so-called security purposes;

If this is a reference to Facebook, it isn't recent. Facebook's policy has always been based around surveillance of actual people, as they have been almost candid enough to maintain.

GPS technology is now being used to monitor public movements;

Why not ubiquitous video cameras. Too old skool for you?

and instant messaging applications are, by default, transcribing their users’ conversations.

I don't know what this means.

Moreover, the manner in which certain types of technology are evolving, such as Image Processing Software, do not seem too promising or focused for safeguarding our privacy interests.

Types of technology? Why is that the subject? Isn't it the motives of the technology developers that determine the degree of respect for privacy?

Second, this eroding of privacy represents a potential chilling effect on expression. Individuals, especially those who have become dependent of online social networks, which come to feel that they cannot communicate or conduct themselves over the Net without leaving their digital footprint, might censor their online speech all together. Also, by not being able to knowingly protect or somewhat conceal their identity, users will certainly be more reluctant to freely read, “speak” and browse through the Internet without fear of repercussions.

Only if people understand what to be afraid of. Where the concern is state oppressive violence, people may be inclined to face away from the technology altogether, or to use it carefully and subversively. Where the motive for the destruction of privacy is cloaked in bullshit about commercial convenience, or even more is accompanied by the exciting opportunity to spy on your friends and family, no such chilling effect occurs. That's the lesson of the current ecologically nearly irreversible fad for informing on everyone through a kinder, gentler, global KGB.

A large part of the problem rests on the level of computer illiteracy in our society. We know how to use the tools, but do not understand how they operate.

No. "We" don't even know how to use the tools. "We" know little more than the horse knows about the buggy.

Most importantly, we do not know what is required to learn their operation. This can be seen translated as an example in the period of time it took society for becoming aware of the eroding of their privacy. And somehow, it feels like we have no choice. The general public perceives the terms and benefits of the Net akin to a contract of adhesion.

No, the general public doesn't even know what "contract of adhesion" means. I think you want to say that the general public takes the behavior of all computers, including their own, as a mysterious fact of nature that they cannot change. Eliminating the jargon will make your idea clearer.

Another part of the problem rests on the amount and type of data that is in control of the companies that provide the services to which we are commercially tied to (e.g. cell phone carriers, search engines). Much of the data that these companies have in their possession could be used to identify the “who”, “when”, “where”, “what” and for “what purposes” of each individual customer. One of the most striking examples can be found in a cell phone history, which can be used to identify all of the whereabouts of its owner throughout its billing cycle.

As I have explained, locating people who use cellphones is a trivial application, because peoples' physical movements are so exceedingly predictable. Nor is the really "striking" thing what happens because individual data flows are accessible. It's what happens when data is "mined," that is, the relation among data flows is rendered self-announcing. You could give a more sophisticated example here.

Of course, the best way to solve this problem would be to educate the illiterates.

No. That would help, of course, but we don't have to be consequentialist about the value of helping people to learn about their world, unless we also have to be consequentialist in order to justify freedom and democracy to ourselves. And no matter how much people know about the problem, it won't do them any good unless the technical environment contains alternatives from which solutions can be constructed. What will solve the problem, therefore, is software that protects peoples' freedom and privacy by default, rather than requiring them to know everything about the engineering that would be required in order to make software designed to hurt them stop doing so. So we need software that supports freedom by design, and we need to make that software in a way that will allow us both technically and economically to embed that software in everything, and even cause people who have no concern for freedom to help us embed that software in everything for purely selfish reasons. Fortunately for humanity, a few people perceived that need a generation ago, not only before the problem was created but even before 99.99999% of humanity knew that the technology causing the problem would ever come into existence. We made free software that protects freedom, we created the social, technical, and legal arrangements that would make it possible to build and distribute without the resources regarded as essential for "innovation" under capitalism, and we transformed the technical environment of the Net, as it was being built, so that such software would not only be always available, but so that it would be the best and most productive environment in which to build more software. Thus we built the internal contradictions from which this particularly disgusting form of capitalism will eventually perish, putting them inside the very equipment this disgusting system requires in order to exist, embedding the revolution in favor of freedom inside the materials of oppression.

You have had the opportunity to learn about that process at its source. You have also experienced that even at the source, the surrounding community is still so ignorant, so blinkered, so maintained in its fat-dumb-and-happiness by the capitalists who mean to continue to reallocate the world's wealth and power to themselves by use of the technologies of unfreedom, that it neither understands what is being done to it, nor who are the allies of freedom constantly working, quite effectively, to maintain the solution they will need when they at last, apparently too late, wake up to the problem.

But, in order to educate, people need to want to be educated. Understand the need for said education. Besides, a major obstacle is that the existing technology is not only easy to use, but also commercially controlled. Meaning that, in order to enjoy the benefits of e-commerce, users need to relinquish their personal information. Hence, this solution seems extremely difficult, if not impossible.

Only if you don't look at the solution we've already architected, implemented, and use all the time.

Another solution rests in the development or adoption of existing “easy to use” technology/software that will allow the public to control who has access to their personal information. However, it seems that no technology can solve this problem altogether. Certainly, examples such as “Tor” software could allow for more secure chatting and browsing over the Net, but users cannot use the same if they want to engage in e-commerce.

False. Who told you that?

Finally, legal approaches such as creating a U.S. Privacy Commissioner to be in charge of overseeing the handling of individuals’ personal information by both the government and private sector could be adopted. Nonetheless, a Privacy Commissioner will be completely useless unless we resolve our privacy framework, which rests upon a patchwork of laws that have been enacted to address issues as they arise piecemeal.