Baxil [bakh-HEEL'], n.
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Below are the 2 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Baxil" journal:
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10:18 am
[Link] |
The death of privacy
As a follow-up to my post on the death of personal privacy earlier this year ... I finally found it again. The link I mentioned in a footnote. The really brilliant essay that summed it all up.
Quoting myself from three years ago, when I had the foresight to link it, albeit from a friends-locked post:
Danny O'Brien wrote a brilliant blog entry about this effect, which I stumbled across [in June 2004]. In brief, he points out that we have three different "registers" (types) of conversation: public, private, and secret, and we communicate in different ways in all of them. In particular, we guard ourselves strongly when "on the record" (in public) in ways that we don't when we're addressing friends or associates. "Private" conversation is not intended to be hidden, but we assume a context that random listeners might not have, and it's aimed only at the audience being specifically addressed.
"Ah," you might say, "so the private register is like an LJ friends list." But the insidious thing is you would be wrong. A friends-list post is secret. It is restricted to only the desired audience, as opposed to "private" conversation, which is at worst hidden by obscurity. The public register is a loudspeaker and a soapbox; secret is a closed-door meeting; private is dinner chat at a restaurant.
The loss of privacy doesn't mean the loss of the secret register (though that register is certainly shrinking, and that's frustrating too). The loss of privacy means the loss of the private register. The notion of being consistently either on the record or totally hidden.
Before the age of the Internet, the vast majority of our lives was on the private register. This is still the case to a large extent. As technology continues to improve, it won't be.
Humanity can live without a private register, but I (still) think our lives will be the poorer for it.
The piece's author, by the way, replied to my e-mail last night*; he says "If you liked it, I did a more wandering talk about the same topic you can download here."
(I also mentioned to him that, given four years of hindsight, I'm really not convinced that the shine has worn off of distant mockery for the masses. "No, me neither," he responded. "And my day job [at the EFF] continues to teach me that the interactions between privacy and free speech aren't done with yet." True dat.)
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* Given that the entire purpose of this post is to lament the ever-widening reach of the public sphere, I really had to think about whether to post excerpts from a (secret-register) e-mail conversation. Yes, massive irony. But on balance I believe no harm is being done here; there's nothing actually secret in the two lines I quoted. The link can be found via a Google search already and Danny's bio is listed on the EFF staff page.
Current Location: ~/brainstorm
Current Music: Hazel Blue, "Bottle In Hand"
Tags: privacy, technology
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06:26 pm
![[User Picture]](http://p-userpic.livejournal.com/4335707/240226) [Link] |
meanwhile
One of the most observant things I ever said was something I first pointed out four years ago: "There is no international crisis so major that it can't be interrupted by a small, stupid crisis close to home."
I wouldn't be surprised if a decent chunk of my friends list is devoting mindspace to Strikethrough 2007 right now (short summary: yes, LJ is actually deleting accounts based solely on their user interests; but before panicking, please click through the link and get all the facts).
Dealing with that is not a bad thing. It does hit close to home. It's something worth taking action on. I spent an hour or two reading up on it, and have taken a few protest actions myself.
But don't forget what's going on in the rest of the world.
And please take a moment of silence with me to mourn the age of personal privacy. It was a good age. We'll miss it.
This development by itself -- Google is apparently driving vans down the street, running cameras and getting still photos of individual buildings for Google Maps -- isn't going to singlehandedly destroy anything. But it is another line being crossed, another step down the slippery slope.
By itself it might mean little. But we're also in an age of YouTube'd cameraphone videos, overnight internet celebrities, personal blogs with global reach, archive.org, dirt-digging via search engine, ubiquitous surveillance, and terrorist watch lists.
I don't know who, for example, this guy is. But his face is already being passed around the internet (as for why, see the background of the photo. Worksafe but suggestive). Someone probably will ID him. And when he does, the odds are good that there will be bad consequences.
What stops that from happening to the rest of us? As of now, only sheer weight of humanity's numbers. There is nothing stopping random and equally embarrassing photos of me, or you, from being spread around the planet at the speed of light; all we can rely on is the fact that with so many targets out there, the odds of instant notoriety are about the same as that of winning the lottery.
Numbers will be a good defense for a while, but as the sheer amount of data and the computing power available to sift through it increases (never mind the development of increasingly sophisticated AI), even that cover will get stripped back. Fifteen to twenty years from now (assuming of course no energy crash, world war, imperial collapse, complete financial meltdown or technological singularity), I suspect we'll be at the point where basically everything we ever say, except in the most secret and encrypted spaces, will be available for endless scrutiny.*
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* As opposed to now, where we can choose to put the things we say on the public record (such as here, in a public blog), but that's not the default choice for all of our communication. I read a great essay some years back -- and my google-fu is failing me at the moment -- about how the Internet was drawing a bright dividing line between hidden communication and exposed communication. It argued we're losing the ability to speak in "semi-public" space -- where we can speak up to those who want to hear without the rest of the world beating down the door to listen in. I need to find that essay again.
Current Location: ~calorg
Current Mood:  somber
Current Music: "Itsoweezee (Radiohead 'I Will' Remix)," DJ Panzah Zandahz
Tags: privacy, technology
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