To share or not to share
In part two of a seven-part series, Don Tapscott argues we each need a personal privacy s Strategy
The ubiquity of digital gadgets and sensors, the pervasiveness of networks and the benefits of sharing very personal information through social media have led some to argue that privacy as a social norm is changing and becoming an outmoded concept. In testimony before a congressional committee, Justin Brookman of the Center for Democracy & Technology — which is pledged to “keep the Internet open, innovative and free” — outlined the dilemma that citizens confront when they want to participate fully in society, yet not live under constant surveillance:
“There is an incredible amount that we as a society have to gain from innovative new technologies, but there is also an incredible amount that we have to lose. Without a framework in place to assure everyday consumers of the ability to limit the collection and retention of the minutiae of their lives by unknown third parties, any sense of a realm of personal privacy may completely evaporate.”
BROOKMAN CITES MANY examples. He compares the digital record kept of stories read on a newspaper’s website to the anonymity of buying and reading a paper from a newsstand. Or going out for a drive, talking to friends, writing letters, watching TV.
“All of these rights are eroding as these activities move into the networked world and surveillance technologies become more sophisticated.”
Brookman likens the decision to opt out of being party to the data collection as analogous to opting out of electricity 30 years ago. “To disconnect from the services that collect such personal, sensitive data would be to disconnect from society.”
This discussion has been ongoing for many years. Stewart Brand wrote famously in 1984:
“Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine — too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient.
“That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property,’ the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.”
FAST FORWARD to today. How unimaginable that hundreds of millions of people are “living out loud” — wilfully providing rich personal data troves that enable a widening circle of organizations to cash in on their use. Beneficiaries include not just marketers but also search engines, software application developers, affiliate sites, government intelligence personnel and, increasingly, other members of society and even criminals.
The tensions between information freedom and personal control are exploding, and not simply because of the benefits of sharing information using new media. Massive commercial and government interests, along with malevolent individuals, have much to gain as each of us reveals highly granular personal information, much of it in the public domain by default. The clear and present danger is the irreversible erosion of that most enabling of liberties: anonymity.
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The fundamental problem with the case of radical personal openness is that we are along way from a world where being open will not hurt us — a world where employers don’t discriminate because an applicant has had a mental illness, held a certain political point of view or was photographed as a teenager having a beer on Facebook.
The now-notorious app Girls Around Me showed the unintended and unwelcome consequences of sharing information online. The iPhone app combined the information people provided on Facebook with the location information from the Foursquare site. In both cases, users would have deemed their personal information to be public. Girls Around Me created a map showing the location and photographs of nearby women. So if you were a guy on the town looking for female company, the app would tell you who was in the neighbourhood.
On its website, the company bragged that the app was a “revolutionary new city scanner app than turns your town into a dating paradise! Use it to see where hot girls and guys are hanging out in your area, view their photos and make contact!” Users could browse “photos of lovely local ladies and tap their thumbnail to find out more about them.”
Many people in the blogosphere said the app went far beyond being helpful and entered the realm of being creepy, even dangerous. I agree. Rather than being courted, I’m sure many of the women felt akin to being stalked.
The women whose faces appeared on the screen did not ask to have themselves presented this way. Girls Around Me did not have permission to use their personal information this way. But Girls Around Me didn’t need their permission, since the profiled women had put the info online and said it was public.
TRUE, THE PROBLEM was corrected. Foursquare has since said its information was no longer available to the Girls Around Me application. Apple has removed the app from its App Store. But we should ask ourselves how many other countless bad actors will attempt to use our data in damaging ways. We should demand that companies practice “privacy by design,” taking privacy concerns into their business DNA. Governments should implement and enforce privacy regulation to protect our personal information from being misused.
Given that few social and legal controls exist over what happens to our personal information, a life plan of “being open” is probably a big mistake. Personal information, be it biographical, biological, genealogical, historical, transactional, locational, relational, computational, vocational or reputational, is the stuff that makes up our modern identity and is the foundation of our personal security. It must be managed responsibly — not just by others but by each of us.
We each need a personal privacy strategy governing what information we release and to whom. Rather than default to openness, we should default to privacy. We could then opt to share information when the benefits outweigh the dangers. NEXT WEEK: PRIVACY, THE SELF AND HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS