I came across an article reporting that the ACLU is raising concerns about the privacy implications of the use of temperature scanners for COVID-19 screening. For the sake of discussion, I will call this understanding of privacy “Technological Privacy”. Technological privacy pertains to data gathering, online presence and content, data mining, OLAP, and so forth. This form of privacy is an invention of recent decades. I watched it appear and evolve, even perhaps had some minuscule role in its development. This is Privacy 3.0, or maybe even a higher version number than that.
While I am generally a supporter and/or admirer of organizations such as the ACLU and the EFF, I have to question both the definition and perspective around the concept of “privacy”. Technological Privacy, in this context, may or may not be a good thing.
Privacy is in some ways an unnatural concept. In most human experience and most of human history, it doesn’t really exist. We are highly social beings. Most people live and/or work in close-knit units, and always have. Be it a household, clan, tribe, village, town, neighborhood, school, church, club, clique, the normal human experience is to know a lot about each other. Anyone who lives in a small town can relate to everyone being in everyone else’s business. Certainly anyone who ever served on a ship or a submarine. Privacy in this very personal, even intimate context isn’t about being able to do things without anyone knowing about it. Instead, there are social expectations around respecting one another. Someone with a reputation for being a gossip or for crossing personal boundaries would be poorly regarded in the community. You keep your dirty laundry to yourself and don’t air out other people’s either. Such expectations are highly contextual. Among family or close friends, my sister might tell a story about something I did as a child, but she would never tell that same story to my manager or a stranger. We navigate such relationships naturally and flexibly. Nothing is codified or legislated.
Privacy in a more modern sense revolves around being able to isolate yourself and keep secrets. You can “get a room” and restrict close relationship to a chosen few. You can sleep in your own bed, in your own room, in your own house. Few see or hear your natural functions. You can do things behind closed doors. This is, and always has been, the luxury of the wealthy and powerful. It was never available to the masses before the Renaissance. Most people in the world today probably don’t experience this luxury. My mother told me stories of her childhood in a house full of relatives. I have visited places where families of 6 live in a one-room corrugated metal shanty in a crowded shanty-town, in a crowded city.
In this time of pandemic, I am keenly aware of the degree to which I am able to control my physical contacts. Even in the United States in 2020 that is only possible to the few. This is why the impact is so much greater to the poor and marginalized.
Technological Privacy goes even further. Before the development of modern computing power and massive databases, the people around you might have known a good bit about you, but nobody could track all that much, and they certainly couldn’t do much with it. Our modern systems, though, they aren’t human and can act in inhuman ways. They can even be used in ways that can exploit or pervert our humanity. So I don’t think the issue is really “privacy” at all. Maybe we need a different word here. I don’t care if Google tracks my location or some camera scans my face. For most people, even me, most of the time for most of our lives, anywhere we go, someone might recognize us or remember where they saw us. What I care about is when these systems become inhuman, and reducing us to data, or things to be used and manipulated. It matters when all of the normal social controls of human society are short-circuited and bypassed. Then we get into a mess of trying to come up with rules, laws, and algorithms. Unfortunately, codifying privacy often ends up making the systems, and us, even less human.
One of the most fascinating things about visiting the Computer Museum in Seattle was that is covers history that I mostly remember. Yes, I have told tech support representatives that I have been in computers since they had blinking lights and switches. There is something strange about seeing your first car or first computer in a museum. Looking at the development of personal computing and its evolution into Internet computing, I realized that the people that built all this did so with a certain philosophical and even political perspective. Some of the concepts that developed from this culture are worthwhile. The idea of Open Source, and the business models that developed from it, is in many ways more human and social than the copyright/patent/royalty system that came from a colonial culture of domination and control. But those who developed the Internet valued anonymity over accountability. When can we admit that we tried that and it was horrible? Anonymity is not privacy, nor does privacy imply compromising accountability. May be we should gradually remake all this with a goal accountability for all actors. There is a Dark Web, but where is the Light Web?
