Analysis: Is privacy dead?
Our unbridled affair with all things technological has an evil twin: a seemingly unstoppable encroachment on our personal privacy. The same streaming video technology that allows grandma and grandpa to chat with their grandchildren is being used to spy on employees in the workplace or capture unsuspecting lovers stealing a kiss.
The rise of e-commerce also enables marketers of all stripes to capture bits and pieces of our buying and Web surfing habits. Database technology enables those bits and pieces of your daily life -- the matrix of your personal world -- to be assembled and repackaged thousand of ways and sold to anyone wanting to target you for a quick sale or an unwitting scam. These are the darker angels of the digital age.
"We know our privacy is under attack," writes Simson Garfinkel in his excellent and severely under-appreciated book, "Database Nation." "The problem is that we don't know how to fight back."
The truth is, fighting to protect privacy is a quixotic venture. Sure, there are any number of technologies, techniques and work-arounds you can employ, all in the effort to protect your privacy. But such a quest is like trying to dig a hole in middle of a fast flowing river. The rich and powerful gain some amount of privacy only because they can afford to grid their personal lives with a kind of digital body armor.
Garfinkel says we need to rethink privacy in the 21st Century.
"It's not about the man who wants to watch pornography in complete anonymity over the Internet. It's about the woman who's afraid to use the Internet to organize her community against a proposed toxic dump -- afraid because the dump's investors are sure to dig through her past if she becomes too much of a nuisance," Garfinkel writes.
Poll after poll confirms that the American public relishes its privacy. The potential loss of privacy ranks as a major concern among an overwhelming majority of the citizenry.
If this is the case, why have you and I simply rolled over when it comes to protecting and demanding our privacy? The answer: convenience and savings.
In the decade before our toasters became smarter than the first personal computers, we became addicted to the "quick and easy." The grocery stores were stocked with one-box meals. "Fast food" entered the American lexicon and the world forever changed. We not only want it now, we wanted it five minutes ago.
Technology fed on that "fast food" mentality and turned us all into speed freaks. Then the marketers and sellers of privacy learned to seduce us with discounts. All we had to do was give up a bit of personal information here or there and presto: 20 percent off. Those poor schmucks that held back on the principle of privacy were getting shafted!
Within the last year several of the grocery stores I frequent started issuing "bonus" cards. You enter your name, address, telephone number and you get a card that, no big surprise, has all that information encoded into its magnetic strip.
When I go to the checkout stand I'm promised a discount on certain purchases if I use my card. I've seen people save up to $50 using those bonus cards. The trade-off is that each time someone uses the bonus card the store registers all those purchases in its database. Over time that database will have an uncanny, precisely detailed chronicle of a shopper's life. And here's the rub: you don't own that information, the store does. They can sell it, slice or dice it any way they want.
Are the savings worth it? Undoubtedly to some, the savings are vital. But don't just assume you have to give up your information to get the discounts. As it turns out some heroic individual challenged one local grocery store about the data they collected on her purchases. After running up the food chain of the store's executive branch, she eventually learned that cards can be issued that don't tally her purchases and stuff them into a hidden database. But who knew?