The title comes from another cool blog post that I found through Kareem’s blog (are you subscribing yet?).
The premise is simple: digital commerce and the surveillance society have made the ability to hide information about oneself something that is surrendered in our decision to participate in modern society.
The answer, according to this post, is equally simple: stop trying to hide, and take control by jamming the system – drown out the things you don’t want people to find in the noise of the things you do want them to find. Or, as Kareem put it: “the more you post about yourself online, the fuller the picture you can paint about yourself, and the more people you will reach.”
This is actually pretty good advice. The people (government, companies, P.I.’s) you don’t want to have access to the information (tax records, credit reports, travel itineraries, credit card bills) you don’t want them to have access to already do. So, why not embrace the system that is enabling this elimination of privacy and use it to your advantage? When you think about it, the inability to hide is the equal and opposite reaction to the ability to self-publish.
Privacy is dead, long live privacy!
This is your invitation to start making the system say what you want to whom you want. If you aren’t doing really bad things, then you should be able to derive more value from this situation than it costs you.
That’s a big if. What’s a really bad thing? Who gets to decide? The government has one idea. Your employer has another. Your bank’s loan officer. Your kid’s private school admissions committee. Your co-op board. Everyone who can use a computer is in a position to pass judgment on you, and some of those judgments may have real impacts on your life.
IMHO, a big part of the solution is in your own control. If you are doing things of which you are ashamed, either stop doing them or stop being ashamed and prepare to defend them. That will probably get you to some 80/20 solution. The unsolved remainder is the scenario in which your defense of your actions is insufficient to prevent the penalties of judgment.
In this increasingly frictionless system, in which all laws (not to mention social conventions, prejudices, and personal opinions) are becoming enforceable, how do you fight back? On one end of the spectrum, there’s the example of a landlord or boss or admissions committee that finds out by reading your blog that you are Muslim and discriminates against you based on that. As offensive as it may be, if you decided that you still wanted to deal with said people, you have both social (boycotts, petitions, etc) and legal (anti-discrimination regulations, etc) means to inflict meaningful pain upon your adversary. On the opposite end of the same spectrum, is the case of an unrepentant murderer who is more than happy to get up in court and explain why he doesn’t believe his crime was wrong. This is why we have the rule of law, which takes the decision of whether the crime is right or wrong out of the hands of the judge and jury trying the case and only asks them to decide if the crime was committed.
Those are both pretty clear-cut examples of the system working. But, between them is a very slippery slope in which it starts to break down. What if you are discriminated against as a member of a class for which the legal process has yet to institute protections and is too small to wield meaningful social power? Or what if you are in fact guilty of violating the law, and you believe it is wrong? This question first occurred to me a little over 2 years ago, when I was living in Glasgow. I had to commute for a few weeks to Edinburgh every day, and my carpool refused to speed. This is because on the road between Glasgow and Edinburgh (and now across much of the UK) there are a series of speed cameras. If you get snapped, you not only have to pay a fine but you also get points put on your license. Enough points, and your license is suspended. Harsh! Without getting into the aggregate social value of traffic laws (in which I believe, despite my driving), this inspired an epiphany related to the enforceability of laws in the digital age.
I realized that many members of society like myself have hidden behind the inefficiency of enforcement when it comes to laws with which we do not agree. This is especially true in cases of what I will call statutory feature-creep: when reactionary politicians implement ill-conceived legislation to pay lip-service to a vocal minority (e.g. the DMCA or Can Spam). The means of affecting the legislative process is so convoluted and wrought with friction, that it has historically cost less for the silent majority to take the minimal risk that they would ever be negatively affected by the bad law than it would for them to stop it from being enacted in the first place. The rationale was essentially, “Let those [insert activist group here] have their fun shooting off their mouths, what does it matter to me?” Well, as technology makes laws more enforceable, it will start to matter to everyone. I’m interested to see what happens when the rest of the world wakes up and realizes that their lives are totally constrained by rules written by special interest groups.
I’ll wrap up with a real example that I think illustrates the dangers of statutory feature-creep in a perfectly enforceable world. I was in a cab a few weeks ago and the driver had Bill O’Reilly’s show on the radio (I guess he figures liberals are too bleeding heart to let a little offensive rhetoric overcome our natural tipping instincts). Bill was taking calls on Megan’s Law, which requires convicted sex-offenders to register and makes their presence known to the community via the internet and other means. I can see the argument that in the abstract there is more value to society in helping to prevent future sex crimes than there is cost to the convicts, and I’m sure that when I become a parent, I will see that value equation become even more lopsided. But, the devil’s in the details. A young man, I think he was 24, called into the show and told of how he must register under Megan’s Law as a sex offender for the rest of his life because he was convicted of statutory rape at 17 for getting caught sleeping with his 15 year-old girlfriend.
So, a law was passed that only affects and would be opposed by 17 year old boys, who are not able to vote, in an effort to appease fathers of 15 year-old girls. It is likely enforced arbitrarily in cases where the boyfriend is hated by the parents for some reason. Without getting rat-holed by a discussion about statutory rape laws, let’s say that this kid served his time. Then another law is hastily passed to gain political capital from a family’s tragedy, without fully thinking through the ramifications of the law or taking appropriate steps� (e.g. scrubbing the list of qualifying sex crimes) to mitigate unintended consequences. And finally, technology enables universal enforceability of this law, so that no one can hide from its ill effects. How is this much better than a preacher affixing a widow with the scarlet letter for spurning his advances?�
This may be a gross over-simplification, and I only use it to illustrate the underlying issue. The goal of the rule of law is to implement a common concept of justice and eliminate arbitrary rewards or punishment. No system is perfect, and there will always be boundary cases that slip through the cracks. However, the inefficiencies in our legal system have�been increasingly gamed by special interests over the past two centuries. And as enforcement becomes more efficient, we must strive to make participation more efficient as well. Lest we all find ourselves at the mercy of a system we no longer control.
Oh yeah, we also need to PARTICIPATE!
– Martin Niemoeller
Great post. Thought provoking and surprising, it feels like this could become a much much bigger conversation, since you touch on several huge issues. Taking a broad view, I think that what is really interesting is the sheer impact that technology, especially those that give people voices or monitor them, has on our lives today. We have to figure out what it is that we can control and then leverage those capabilities to maintain or even increase our influence in the future.
I’m also interested in this topic (privacy) and how it affects mainstream user behavior going forward. Have you read Fred Stutzman’s blog and/or are you familiar with his latest venture, ClaimID? Basically, it is a step towards addressing the issue of individual control over privacy and identity. ClaimID allows you to “claim” your online identity and influence what is surfaced when others search for you online. Fred has written a fair amount on privacy and identity sharing (he spent the last semester studying Facebook) —
check him out here –>
http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/2006/03/identity-and-web-information-science.html
and here –>
http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/