Privacy is nice, but I wouldn't lose much sleep if a secret film showing my most embarrassing moments was available to all the people on the planet who don't know me and will never meet me. That is, as long as I am not identified. Its anonymity that is essential.
A celebrity can be defined as someone who has lost their general anonymity. Their name, image and accomplishments are known to more than just their circle of friends. To them, privacy is worth keeping because anonymity is already gone. For everyone else, anonymity provides enough isolation to live with.
As surveillance increases in the public sphere, its important to be clear about what matters and what is irrelevant. We know that no one is going to take the high street cameras down - increased snooping is here to stay.
What breaks the protection of anonymity is the correlation of information that links different pieces of data - sometimes called data mining, or even "joined up government".
Take the good old Oyster card. When I go into an underground station, a camera probably picks up my image. My card, which is registered, makes a record as I pass through the barrier. I will then appear on other cameras as I leave the tube system. Maybe my voice will be picked up be Police eavesdropping equipment.
Now lets rewind.. what connects my image on camera to my registration? With access to the camera and the barrier data, its no problem for someone to take a guess that the person seen walking through the barrier at 10:24 is the same as the registered user passing through the gates. Two separate pieces of data, correlated by a human.
And I couldn't give a fig about that. Human detective work moves at human pace. The same bloke that linked the two pieces of data could have done a similar task by asking the station manager or a nosy newsagent. If someone is trying to track me down, then someone must think I really am worth the effort.
Its when computers talk to other computers that liberty disappears. Because a computer can correlate countless bits of data and create new records that would take many humans exponentially longer to do. And that gap, or grace period, is actually where anonymity lies, or did.
In the digital era the process of correlation is not humans talking to humans, its programs interrogating databases. A credit card is used in a store. A high street camera tracks a face in the crowd. Now I am identified and located.
One probably essential point to freedom is choosing which realm, public or private, we want to be in at any one time. A blog, for example, may act as a public keyhole into the bloggers life - even if the identity of the writer is unknown. A columnist on a broadsheet paper could use a pseudonym. The choice is the writers.
When the cameras on the congestion zone see my car, they automatically check DVLA to see if I my licence plate has any infringements. In short, my movements are immediately being linked with criminal activity - and never with my authority. And of course the cameras are on even while the zone is not in force.
While the good side of sharing data - federation - helps us work with others in trade and commerce, correlation is the evil twin. It is the unauthorised creation of connections that you didn't know you were making. Remember; your mobile is tracking you, your calls are logged, your home power usage is recorded, your browser visits are saved, and needless to say your credit card bill is as good as a diary. What unintended connections could be produced with all that lovely stuff?
Too much data created by correlation will quickly produce a shadow representation of yourself, that is beyond control. Accurate enough to be implicate you in a terrorist plot, but never complete enough to illuminate your motives.
5 comments:
Very sharp piece - and well written.
Of course, we have been digitally buggered for quite some time now - and there is not much we can do about it.
On the way back from hospital today, I noticed that just about all of the cameras I noticed were on the first floor level or thereabouts. i fantasised about a Spiderman life, swinging above the watchers, without an Oyster or Credit card to ruin the line of my skintight Spidey Suit.
Then I remembered I'm afraid of heights.
Didn't Benny Hill perfect a jamming device that scrambled CCTVs in The Italian Job? Time to find the blueprints methinks
Accurate enough to implicate you in a terrorist plot? Maybe after the event. But if I remember correctly there was nothing that set the 7/7 bombers apart from their fellow travellers until they blew themselves up.
This terrorism thing is a convenient excuse; those who are trying to watch us aren't after security, but power.
The difficulty in the surveillance/liberty argument is that notions of liberty are being out-stripped by technological advance.
The desire to infringe on our liberty may be provoked less by power-lust and more by the availability of the technology to actually do it.
Once the possibilities for gathering data are glimpsed at a mind not especially convinced by arguments supporting freedom cannot resist making use of all those goodies.
Accurate enough to implicate you in a terrorist plot?
Yes, of course, why not? Does Dave think that pre-emptive security or even pre-emptive wars are beyond the pale these days? I think they are not. I pray I don't accidentally go to a "terrorist" tube station and end up in guantanmo bay.
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