Redefining privacy.

It’s Choose Privacy Week, whatever that is (not even Wikipedia knows!). First time I’ve heard of it anyway, but 20K Films made a movie or two about it, and they say:

“The first-ever Choose Privacy Week will take place May 2-8, 2010 and is a new program created by the American Library Association to help librarians organize events in their communities about the role that privacy plays in their lives, why privacy is important, and how their privacy can be compromised on a daily basis.”

The movie is a treasure trove in defining the modern privacy and integrity problems that have been escalating for the last few decades in a well-rounded sort of way. I can’t help but feel that there’s an important piece of the puzzle missing though, and it’s only touched upon briefly at the very end of the video: that privacy is a changing and evolving concept, and that privacy is different, depending on the context.

When I was studying Japanese, there was a rather interesting passage we read in school regarding privacy. In essence, privacy was not only an unheard of concept in Japan back in the day, but it was in fact detrimental to the health of society at the time. Not knowing where Tanaka-san the fisherman had gone off to last night could very well lead to his demise, because the members of his village didn’t go look for him in the woods (maybe he’d broken a leg due to a bad fall or something).

While Japan today might seem like a very private place, and while people are far less inclined to tell you what they feel or think, the Japanese do not hold privacy very high — at least not digital privacy, or rights online. Every single click you make is scanned and compared and analyzed. I know this first-hand, because I was the subject of several threatening letters related to copyright infringement, and the crime which I supposedly committed did not become a law until the year after I left Japan. Summarily, the ISP kept tabs, not to obey the law, but to appease whatever company paid them to keep tabs on their users — us.

Think about that for a second. They didn’t have to. But they did.

A friend of mine, when he signed up for an internet service with an ISP in Osaka, was asked whether he wanted the “service” of the ISP being able to at any given time look at his monitor and see what he was doing. All he had to do was install this piece of software.

He declined. The representative was flabbergasted. So was my friend’s girlfriend. In the end, the girlfriend had to tell the guy, “I’m sorry, he’s Swedish, they’re like this,” to which he apparently gave an uncertain nod and nixed it from the list of “services”.

Alongside this event, my teacher in school brings up the subject of privacy and of school records of children, that these records are sold to corporations and that said corporations use them to market their products (“Your daughter turns 20 this year, right?” – “Yes she does, actually, why?” – “Have you gotten a kimono arranged for her yet? If not, our company specializes in coming-of-age ceremony kimonos and would be honored to help you out.” I believe was the (fake) scenario depicted in the school text). My teacher pointed out the horrors of this unjust behavior, and all the while, her computer at home can at the flip of a switch be monitored by her ISP — judging from that rep’s reaction, not a lot of people decline that wonderful offer.

Privacy in a small village is not the same as privacy in a metropolitan city, nor does it work the same. Privacy in Japan is obviously not the same as privacy in Sweden. Privacy for a 15-year old isn’t the same as privacy for a 50-year old. It’s being redefined beneath our feet, and refined to fit niches and groups on a more precise and specific level.

In the Choose Privacy Week movie, a lot is being said about one’s actions online being permanent — no matter how many delete keys you press, once you’ve hit “send” on that email, or that forum post, or even blog post, you’re stuck with that information online, spreading completely outside of your control, which, unless you happen to be a marketing firm, can be a rather painful and destructive thing to have happen. Posting your age or phone number or interests on Facebook will inevitably mean that said information is processed and turned into a package deal that is sold to whoever pays enough.

“Why do free social networks tilt inevitably toward user exploitation? Because you’re not their customer, you’re their product.”
– Tim Spalding (via Cory Doctorow on Twitter).

At 360iDev as well as at the Voices That Matter iPhone conference, a recurring concept was that of “mining your users to better understand your own product”. The concept is as follows: track every keypress, track every page flip, track everything your user inputs into your application and feed it to your central server. Process that information, and figure out vital things such as which features users tend to use, and even more importantly, which features users tend to not use, in order for you to over time tailor your app to suit the needs of your users better and better.

My immediate reaction to this was “dear fuck, what about privacy?” and from what I can tell, Apple supposedly ensures that users do not mine sensitive data, and apparently also cracks down on misuse of said data. But Apple’s not exactly the ideal privacy protecting superhero, except in that they’d lose reputation (and cash) if it was leaked that their applications, well, leaked.

Regardless, it is an under-advertised “feature” that whatever app you install on your i* has the ability to feed a central server somewhere with information about everything you do in it. And it doesn’t have to tell you (as opposed to when it wants to track your current location). (As a sidenote, do you think Apple’s servers need to ask you for permission finding your iPhone? Not really, as any MobileMe account holder can (contentedly/relievedly) affirm, since it’s possible to locate your phone remotely online.)

The internet, and the world, has been steadily moving toward a new form of privacy. People like Cory Doctorow are (and rightly so) advocating more protection of user’s integrity, but the user him/herself keep taking steps further and further into, well, the light. We’re opening ourselves up more and more as we encloud ourselves and place more and more of us out there. Gmail online, not POP3. Google, which (in an open, we’re-harmless-we-promise sort of way) tracks your searches to tailor your results after your specific interests, blogs, where we exhale slowly, Twitter, where we do it quickly, IM’s, Facebook, where we tell everyone who’s listening exactly who we are and who we know… there’s not a lot that we’re not saying anymore.

In fact, I’d wager that the only things we’re not saying are the things we want to keep to ourselves. But we slip, we’re human. We blurt a little too much, in a blog, a forum, on IM’s, in an email, somewhere, and it’s stored and analyzed and categorized. And I’m not just being paranoid.

Sometimes we don’t even have to say anything at all. Guilt by association has been turned into an art form by the witch hunt for terrorists and/or evildoers of various kind. I have friends who are republicans and friends who are democrats, friends who are communists, or extreme-right wing nuts, gay friends, straight friends, old and young friends, I have friends who hate cops, Christian friends, atheist friends, muslim friends, and the list goes on — the very dirty-laundry sort of list. One might argue whether being friends with a right-wing nut is appropriate at all, but I can’t really choose my friends’ political views, and you’d be surprised at the level of intellectual capacity even certain right-wing nuts might have.

One of my more verbal friends had a blog once. He’d talk about everything and anything. One day, he applied for a job and got an interview. They were excited. He seemed like the man for the job. Then bam, they told him to continue searching. The reason? They’d Google’d his name and found his blog, and couldn’t have someone with his opinions in their work place. Trouble maker. His blog is no more.

Our privacy isn’t what it used to be. Jesse Schell talks a little about this in his DICE2010 talk labeled “Design Outside the Box“, a talk which I wholeheartedly recommend anyone remotely interested in game design, or the future for that matter. He describes “the future” as a place where every move we make is tracked and analyzed by machines, where our corn flakes box lets us play a game as we eat our corn flakes and see our points compared to our friends that week; he talks about how our future selves will read a book on our Kindle and get an achievement that we’ve read our thousandth book, and that we’d be embarrassed that our thousandth book was a stupid Star Trek novel. That we’d stop to think and realize that we didn’t know what our grandparents read, but our grandchildren will be able to see exactly everything we did and read and that maybe, we should try to be a little better and do better things with our lives… (except he says it much better — just watch it until the end, even though it’s close to 30 minutes long).

And maybe that’s precisely it. The inevitable truth is, we — the remnants of us that fear the loss of privacy and try to maintain it in some form, traditional or not — are fighting a losing battle, and sooner or later, everything we do will be registered and monitored and tracked and analyzed. I’m not even going to bother reassuring you that this isn’t paranoid thinking — if you think it is, seriously, you’ve gotta start reading the news, buddy. Or just reading, period.

But let’s look at it from a different perspective, by giving a small analogy. In a village with 100 villagers, privacy is non-existent. It is, because everyone knows everything about everyone. There is no privacy to be had in an environment like that. Old Joe Schmoe can’t get an erection anymore, and everyone knows, because that’s just how it is. Joe might feel infuriated and insulted about it, but at least the rest of the world doesn’t know about his predicament — small comfort to Joe, but relevant to our analogy.

In a big metropolitan city, Joe’s predicament is except in rare cases not known by anyone, or known only to those close to Joe himself. Him, his doctor, his significant other, and that’s probably it. Privacy is greater, because there are more people to blend into. We’re more anonymous.

Then we have the internet. The internet is the mutt, the screwed-up offspring of the village mentality of everybody knowing everything and the metropolitan anonymity of blending into the masses. It’s the ants on your TV when the crows ate your antenna. Black. White. White. Black. Black. Nothing is really gray here. More people know about more people. More people are famous for lesser reasons. Just take a moment and marvel at all the (ridiculous, one might accuse) “online celebrities” and what they’ve done to become so known to the world. That guy who cried about leaving Britney Spears alone? That kid with the laser sabre whom found himself the subject of countless “re-makes” where people did everything from turning his wooden stick into a real live zzzzzzmmm-yowling sabre to ridiculing him mercilessly. If I recall right, his parents tried to raise a fuss about it, but what’s there to do about it, anyway? It’s out there. No amount of hitting ‘delete’ is going to take it away.

Posterity online is a phenomenon all by itself. It’s like the subject of an immensely intricate equation, where week-old stuff vanishes without a trace and decades-old stuff remains. Those deemed famous by the online community will linger for who knows how long — maybe forever.

We fool ourselves, thinking that with the masses and masses of information online, we are the untraceable needle in the haystack, but the internet is evolving as rapidly as the content in which we aim to hide grows — if you’ve ever whined about a company on Twitter, you might have had the pleasant surprise of said company responding to your tweet. Just by writing the right keyword into your message, they get it fed to them via Twitter’s own search feature. Do you know how much information passes through Twitter in a day?

“By the end of 2007, about 500,000 tweets per quarter were posted. By the end of 2008, 100 million tweets per quarter were posted. By the end of 2009, 2 billion tweets per quarter were posted. In the first quarter of 2010, 4 billion tweets per quarter were posted.” (bolded by author)
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

4 billion tweets per quarter. Or roughly 50 million tweets a day. If every tweet averages at 100 letters, that’s 5 billion letters. Every day (this entire post counts 15k letters — the same amount is tweeted in one fourth of a second). If a company can find the mention of their name in 50 million tweets a day — 600 tweets a second — just like that, that probably means your “blending into the crowd” trick is flawed.

We aren’t used to this but the kids of our time are. How will they define privacy as adults, having been surrounded by the perpetual lure of providing more and more pieces of themselves to perfect the product that they are to Facebook or whatever may take its place in the future. They will inevitably see those around them lifted up into the light from the shadows of anonymity, to be ridiculed or praised or both, and then cast aside when they no longer provide entertainment for the masses. Their friends will be the rock stars and celebrities we could only see at a distance, stalked and exposed to anyone who cared. They will learn to deal with the public continuum that surrounds, even dictates, their lives. Privacy won’t be then what it is today, but the people of that time will know, on a near instinctual level, how to cope with and remain private. Privacy won’t be then what it is today, but perhaps we can guide the evolution of it onto a democratic path.

Meanwhile, before you go to that job interview — or go on that overseas trip, try Googling your full name or nick name, skim your blog for objectionable content, scan your Twitter feed, and come up with good responses for when they ask you about it. Presuming they even bother to ask.