No do-overs once personal privacy’s breached
As one conference speaker said, online culture ‘Wild West of moral relativism’
The Exorcist, The Shining and A Nightmare on Elm Street are considered the top three horror movies ever made.
They can’t hold a candle to the scare delivered by the annual three-day national conference on privacy put on by the Privacy and Access Council of Canada last week in Calgary.
Biometrics, data breaches, doxing, facial recognition software, surveillance, stalking, the fact everything is tracked and there are cameras everywhere are all modern horror stories.
It scared the pants off me, but it doesn’t scare enough other people. It doesn’t scare our shared society. Technology can be blamed, but it’s only the road, not the reason. At the heart of the assault on our rights and privacy is ourselves; our willingness to trade privacy for bling with a USB port and unlimited access to the world.
I grew up without exposure to social media and its never-erased memory. I’d be a pariah if some of my more egregious antics were recorded. That’s because, regardless of the tenor of the times, everyone is judged by modern standards, ignoring the reality of a time frame.
That is the result of a technology that doesn’t allow for erasure, mistakes or re-dos. It is the misery of memory recalled and, mostly, unforgiven.
Perhaps the scariest part of modern technology is the rise of biometrics. If someone hacks my password, I can change it. If someone hacks my unique fingerprints or iris pattern, I am, in a word, fakakta. (Yiddish that can stand in place of the F word.)
The piracy and data access congress is not designed to scare participants. After all, most of them are charged with the privacy concerns of companies, institutions and governments. I was the MC, the most unqualified person in attendance.
Sharon Polsky, president of the Privacy and Access Council of Canada, once told me my Smart TV had a camera that could record my every move. (Once I find it, I’ll tape over it, although what it could record of my television-watching habits would include nothing more salacious than me falling asleep on the chesterfield or my sneaking a third scotch.)
I already had suspicions about the appliances aroused when a refrigerator repairman suggested I “reboot” it. Who knew? Who suspected the fridge was a computer? Don’t even mention the obvious: Alexa or Siri is always listening and sometimes sharing, as is the baby monitor and your car, recording every movement of you and the machine of which you are purportedly in charge.
The congress raised my anxiety level to Defcon3 because as technology increases our ability to carry a zillion bytes of information on a thumb drive, almost no system cannot be hacked or stolen or invaded. Worse, as our devices get more sophisticated, we get lazier about protecting our personal information.
As one speaker said, online culture is the “Wild West of moral relativism.”
Amazon is offering an
Echo Dot for 99 cents when a customer signs up for the Music Unlimited service. The real price you are paying is incalculable. It’s “selling your soul for a mess of potage,” as the adage goes.
Try to convince a connected generation there is something more valuable than the latest iphone.
Try to bring back friendship based on conversation, not texting; try to bring back intimacy based on physical closeness, not swiping right (or whatever a younger generation does to indicate interest in the opposite/same sex.)
Technology has made life easier but it has also turned us into a culture celebrating social alienation. Your kid can hide in his basement bedroom and never come out, yet be connected to the world. But is he actually connected to people? The argument made is that humans started out as a tribal culture and now we’ve become “a land of high-tech nomads.”
Personally, I’m a lucky citizen; I have not had to apologize or explain my past bad behaviour. No one in the modern world can enjoy that anonymity.