ON THE PRIVACY DILEMMA

DEAL WITH THE DEVIL?

In a post a couple of days ago, I talked about the slippery slope we face as a society, as we struggle with the tug of war between the wonderful conveniences that come from giving up certain aspects of our privacy both online and off, and the increasing privacy trade-offs that are implicitly entailed. (image source). 

These privacy trade-offs are not always with the "Big Brother" governments of Orwellian fame, but with lots and lots of little brothers all around us.

Today, the Wall Street Journal, has an interview with Cory Doctorow, who just released a short, sci-fi story titled "Scroogled", which tells a cautionary fictional tale about this slippery slope, using Google as the future catalyst for near-evil outcomes.  Both the story and the interview make interesting reading.

But in the interview, Cory tells the story of a meeting, that reminded me of a historical story that I'd read long ago as a World War II history buff, that is hugely relevant in our current societal dilemma:

"I had a really interesting meeting a couple of years ago with some of the [chief information officers] of Danish ministries. We sat down to talk about data interoperability and document retention.

Document retention's a really thorny one, because hard drives are cheap, and governments don't really understand why they shouldn't just save everything. Who knows when it will be useful?

I started to talk to them about this, and a gentleman put his hand up and said you know, you may need to talk to people in other countries about this, but you don't need to talk to the Danes about this.

Because after the Nazis occupied Copenhagen, they went down to the police station and got from the files all the addresses of the people they wanted to round up and stick in boxcars, and they took them away. We don't retain anything here.

As soon as we're done with it, we throw it away because we understand that you can't always predict how information will be used, and the only way to ensure it's not misused is to get rid of it when you're done with it."

The reality is that there're too many opportunities to both provide new services around what I'd call the "privacy dilemma",  that mainstream folks are going to like and use, AND for companies to make money doing so. 

So we'll keep doing it until there are catastrophic events that are personal, institutional, national, or just plain human, that'll give us reason to pause and possibly re-consider the trade-offs.

Comments

[candice]

There is a movement floating around involving Librarians and shredding records in the U.S. for about the same reasons, post Patriot Act.

I probably have a few articles tagged somewhere about it, or my librarian friends do.

[Alex Tolley]

"So we'll keep doing it until there are catastrophic events that are personal, institutional, national, or just plain human, that'll give us reason to pause and possibly re-consider the trade-offs."

We have already had these catastrophes in medical insurance, but since all the benefits go to the companies, nothing has been re-evaluated of changed. Europe has extremely opposed views to information privacy compared to the US which are enshrined in various privacy laws.

It is arguable that we already have an unfolding catastrophe with identity fraud in the US, as databases of personal data are left poorly secured and data is traded so frequently between companies that access is just inevitable. Again, what is being done to combat this epidemic?

Cory is making the point that we may be paving our own road to hell even as we gain benefits from sharing our data with service suppliers, simply because we don't know how that data may be used in the future.