Thoughts on Privacy

This post is pretty heavy on the pon­tif­i­cat­ing, but I’ll tie it back into GNOME at the end, I swear.

I’ve been think­ing quite a bit about pri­vacy lately. Most of the shiny things here on the inter­net are some type of ser­vice where you aban­don some degree of pri­vacy to an inter­me­di­ary in return for con­ve­nience or com­mu­nity: your blog, Facebook, Twitter, GMail, Amazon​.com, and Last​.fm take much of the ran­dom bits of your life and put them into corporate-owned data­bases so you can con­nect with friends, buy ran­dom things with­out mov­ing, or not have to edit the same silly pref­er­ences dialogs 50 times. OKCupid, Google Latitude and Mint do so with your pec­ca­dil­loes, your phys­i­cal loca­tion, and your finan­cial records.

There’s a cer­tain amount of trust involved in par­tic­i­pat­ing in all this: the trust that your infor­ma­tion is ulti­mately anony­mous or only sold to adver­tis­ers. Of course, Google logs what you’re look­ing for, and every­thing that’s made pub­lic, and it’s worth point­ing out that there’s really noth­ing pre­vent­ing an orga­ni­za­tion from col­lat­ing all this infor­ma­tion together, which is an end to most of what we call pri­vacy and the sense of free­dom that comes along with it. About the only excep­tion is med­ical records, which are pro­tected in the US by pri­vacy laws. My under­stand­ing is that it’s a crime to give unau­tho­rized peo­ple access to those records, but I’m a lit­tle shaky on what hap­pens after that pri­vacy has been breached — that is, once the bribed clerk has given out the records, are there laws to pre­vent the recip­i­ent from dis­trib­ut­ing them further?

Minutiae aside, there’s a larger, unasked ques­tion of the social cost for all this. Does the lack of pri­vacy man­i­fest as a mon­u­men­tal chill­ing effect? Does it turn out after all your activ­i­ties are cat­a­loged and recorded that you’re less free? Do you self-censor and live in fear of being dis­cov­ered, or (I’d say) fool­ishly assume that your pri­vacy is a tra­di­tional social norm that will con­tinue to be respected? Grab a green flag and march against the fact the only real pri­vacy you have is “the two inches inside your own head?”

Whatever the social cost of this new world will turn out to be, we’re liv­ing in it already, and peo­ple are going to have to fig­ure out how to make it com­pat­i­ble with the con­cept of a free soci­ety. Which is why I redesigned my blog to inte­grate the Lifestream word­press plu­gin and dis­play all of my publically-accessible activ­i­ties in one place: the music I’m lis­ten­ing to, the movies I’m watch­ing, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. I’d actu­ally like it if I could put my Amazon​.com pur­chases on there like Facebook tried to do with­out ask­ing any­one. There’s noth­ing in any of these data­bases that a gov­ern­ment agency, cor­po­ra­tion, or part­ner couldn’t get their hands on if they wanted really to.

I promised I’d tie this back into GNOME at some point: pos­si­bly the most inter­est­ing thing about a project like Zeitgeist is that it puts that record of what you’re doing in a place where you can access it — it doesn’t solve the under­ly­ing con­flict, of course, but it does let you use it for your own purposes.