Tech’s future demand for privacy
FBI Director James Comey designed his social media presence to be safe from prying eyes: He set up a private Instagram account followed only by family members and subscribed to Twitter under a false name.
After just one mention in a public speech, it took only a few hours of a reporter’s time to discover the accounts with certainty approaching 100 per cent.
If anyone really wants Comey’s family pictures and media-reading history, the Instagram and Twitter accounts will be hacked in no time. In any case, the companies involved have the data, and the Senate recently voted to allow internet service providers to sell personal browsing and app usage histories to advertisers – or, presumably, to anybody who wants them.
Meanwhile, the internet privacy of non-us citizens is not protected at all thanks to an executive order that tells agencies foreigners are exempt from the US Privacy Act, even though European officials cling to the illusion of an unenforceable ‘‘Privacy Shield’’ arrangement with the US.
People the world over should be aware that using any of the services provided by major Usbased internet companies means giving up privacy altogether and opening up the most personal data to governments, advertisers, the press and private investigators. It also makes malicious hackers’ work a lot easier because a lot of eggs are being put in large baskets.
Until now, the services have flourished anyway thanks to the well-known privacy paradox: People say they care about their privacy, but in practice they willingly give it up for convenience. Last year’s Pew Research study of the paradox showed a plurality of Americans is fine with giving up shopping histories in exchange for a discount card, but not with putting tracking devices in cars in exchange for cheaper car insurance.
The trade-off, though, is highly fluid. Customers may become hostile to privacy intrusions by the tech industry if there are more major security breaches and more people are personally affected. So while investment currently flows mostly to companies whose products further compromise privacy, privacy protection may be Silicon Valley’s next hot play.
While there are many privacy protection products available, from browsers that block trackers to messenger applications offering end-to-end encryption, using one or several such products doesn’t guarantee true safety. Users need a holistic approach that entails lifestyle changes to stay safe, but still connected to, the tech-enabled universe.
A company called Purism, for example, sells laptops with maximum privacy and security in mind. It means not using certain processors – like recent Intel ones – that enable remote access to the computers even when they’re powered off. It also employs an operating system that prevents information collection, and has privacy-ensuring software, from a custom browser to encrypted messaging to a Google-bypassing map app. But Purism is a tiny firm, which has had to crowdfund its component inventory.
Because much of the tech economy is advertising-financed, and advances in important fields such as big data and artificial intelligence depend on people’s propensity to share lots of information, much of it inadvertently, privacy concerns have taken a back seat. That doesn’t mean, however, that the status quo is sustainable.
The more intrusive the tech industry becomes, the less users want to be the commodity sold by tech companies to advertisers or other exploiters of behavioral data, and the more demand there will be for means of resistance.
Investors betting on a Big Brother future may be in for some nasty surprises. Those who bet against its endurance may be rewarded for their prescience.
Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.