Zeal For Truth

“You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” - Scott McNealy, CEO, Sun Microsystems, January 1999.

Time was, only your nosy neighbors knew your business. Not today. These days, everything you do or say is being watched, recorded, and saved in a database forever.

• As a crime deterrent, the city of London has thousands of CCTV cameras in public areas, recording everything. This Is London, 2007 Sept. 19
• In 2001, cameras and face-recognition software scanned each of the thousands of fans who attended Superbowl XXXV in Florida. Call It Super Bowl Face Scan I, 2001 Feb. 2
• The June 2004 issue of Reason magazine paired customer addresses with satellite photos, and delivered magazines with custom covers showing views of each subscriber’s house. Reason Magazine, June 2004
• Credit bureaus maintain massive dossiers on each person, recording details of credit history, bank accounts, employment, places of residence, and criminal records. How Private is my Credit Report?, October 2006
• Supermarkets offer discount cards, which the companies then use to track each shopper’s purchases and figure out buying trends.
• “Electronic tollbooths track your movements on roads and bridges.” Parade magazine, September 16, 2007

The privacy scare has swept through the public. We now have television public service announcements about internet privacy.

Should you be worried about the erosion of privacy? No, you should celebrate it, says author David Brin. His 1998 book on privacy is called The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? Grossly simplified, his premise is this: privacy protects the rich and powerful by shielding them from criticism. Only by peeling away layers of privacy can we achieve a level of transparency that will force the powerful to be accountable for their actions.

In all of history, we have found just one cure for error–a partial antidote against making and repeating grand, foolish mistakes, a remedy against self-deception. That antidote is criticism.

Brin casts the privacy discussion in terms of information flow. He introduces the Accountability Matrix. There are four types of privacy/transparency tools.

You might be tempted to say categories 1 and 2 are good but 3 and 4 are bad. After all, you don’t want the government seeing what you’re up to! That’s the wrong reaction, according to Brin. In reality, it doesn’t matter how much the government knows about you.

Historically, the ability of governments to oppress has always depended on maintaining the one-way flow of information. King, tyrants, and parties in power above all concealed information from the citizenry at large. In contrast, one would be hard pressed to show that restricting the amount of information flowing to the government has more than a marginal impact on preventing the arrival of tyranny.

The way to maintain a free society is to maximize transparency by preserving the free flow of information. It doesn’t matter if the government knows what the citizens up to, as long as the citizens know what the government is up to. An informed citizenry will see and prevent abuses. Only under the veil of secrecy can abuses flourish. Thus, a culture that values freedom should hold categories 1 and 3 as good, and categories 2 and 4 as bad.

Brin makes little distinction between government and companies when evaluating transparency. The need for transparency is no less when the Orwellian institution is a credit bureau as opposed to a government agency. Credit bureaus are Brin’s case in point: for years, the bureaus refused to let people see what was in their own credit report. When the government finally forced the bureaus to be more open, people could finally view their own credit reports and identify errors. The quality and accuracy of credit reports increased because of the new transparency.

Daniel J. Solove, Associate Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School, criticizes Brin for promoting transparency as a panacea. In his 2004 book, The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age, he points out that transparency does nothing to help ordinary people who don’t have the resources to sift through a wealth of information.

Brin fails to realize that affording mutuality of access to information will do little to empower ordinary individuals. The reason is that information is much more of an effective tool in the hands of a large bureaucracy. Information is not the key to power in the Information Age–knowledge is. Information consists of raw facts. Knowledge is information that has been sifted, sorted, and analyzed. The mere possession of information does not give one power; it is the ability to process that information and the capability to use the data that matter. In order to solve the problem, a transparent society would have to make each individual as competent as bureaucratic organizations in processing information into knowledge.

Solove’s objection is valid. Bureaucracies are better able to make use of information than an average unskilled citizen. Transparency will not make ordinary people the equal of powerful corporations and governments. Citizens will still need watchdog organizations and advocacy groups to protect their privacy rights. But that does not lessen the need for transparency. As Brin says, surveillance technology is here and it will be used.

[It] is already far too late to prevent the invasion of cameras and databases. The djinn cannot be crammed back into its bottle. No matter how many laws are passed, it will prove quite impossible to legislate away the new surveillance tools and databases. They are here to stay.

Light is going to shine into nearly every corner of our lives.

…

We may not be able to eliminate the intrusive glare shining on citizens of the next century, but the glare just might be rendered harmless through the application of more light aimed in the other direction.

The benefits of transparency are already being recognized. In the United States, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) allows citizens to access a wealth of federal documents that shed light into the workings of the US government. Many US states have similar laws to achieve transparency into the workings of state governments.

We are still a long way from Brin’s transparent society, but we are moving that way.