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All Tracking, All the Time
Between this excellent articl on the Phoenix about RFID and this new blast from Wired about cell-phone tracking laws, it’s becoming clear to me that it’s all over.
The battle for privacy, that is. The fight for anonymity and the ability to go places and do things without being constantly monitored and analyzed. A lot of people still seem to think that if we just protest and make our voices heard, then the tide of technology and business will be shifted and we’ll be able to retain our lives and identities the way that they are now more or less unscathed.
But it’s too late and too few of us are recognizing that. From that article in the Phoenix, they reveal that even without using RFID or other sophisticated new tracking technologies, Walmart already has a whopping 460 terabytes of customer data stored from its cash registers. “To put that into perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data,” the article says. That’s the ENTIRE internet. And they go on to quote an official at the EFF: “There’s this giant infrastructure that collects, buys, and sells your info. Even if there weren’t a single RFID, they’d be doing that.”
But there are RFID chips, and they are shrinking down to the size of a grain of sand. IBM has patents out on identifying and tracking individuals in public spaces based on the technology. And then there’s your cell phone - consistently sending out an identifying beacon with your location, and records of everyone you talk to and who they talk to, and when you’re all clustered together. Not that that even matters though - with us all voluntarily spilling our guts each and every day on the internet.
It’s too late to fight it. I’m convinced. Does that mean we just have to sit back and accept it? I’m not so sure about that. But it seems like it’s time to redraw the battle lines before the war moves past us all together. Let’s think 5 or 10 years down the road. Let’s imagine a world in which everything you do, say - maybe even think - is known, tracked, predicted, quite possibly even controlled. What will our lives be like then? What will privacy mean to us? Individuality? Will those ideas seem antiquated or irrelevant? What will we build our identities around when all of our secrets are not only known but can be googled instantly?
What will it mean to be authentically human then as compared to now? What will retain, lose and gain from it? We better get started thinking about this stuff now, feeling it out, carving out our own niches before they are done for us, before technology and business is able to have the last laugh at our expense.
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May 8th, 2006 at 4:51 pm
“And then there’s your cell phone - consistently sending out an identifying beacon with your location, and records of everyone you talk to and who they talk to, and when you’re all clustered together.”
Is that for sure? First, they tell you you can turn the location feature off. My own phone service tells me that, anyhow. Ostensibly, no one can locate my phone unless I dial 911 on it.
Second, is phone activity somehow linked to the GPS service in such a way that both bits of info (where I am and what I’m doing with my phone) can be easily accessed by inappropriate persons? I haven’t heard of such a thing.
Second, exactly who has access to this info? My assumption is that the phone company can get to my personal phone info without any trouble at all and that various authorities (law enforcement etc.) can access the info with just a little bit of red tape to mess with. Commercial organizations probably don’t have access to the data right now, but they’d like to and are working on it, is my guess.
Privacy is a strange thing. Social theorists will tell you that it is an entirely modern concept, not something citizens of centuries past would have even thought about. It’s also a somewhat flimsy legal concept, guaranteed to US citizens only by Supreme Court interpretations of the Constitution, and not any explicit ratified law. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)
Privacy is also a concept very closely tied to class. In other words, you can buy it. Rich people can have plenty of privacy if they outfit their worlds with lots of security and aggressive lawyers. Or, more specific to your comments, a wealthy individual can send the housekeeper to WalMart with his/her own “savings card” to swipe, and have an office with secretaries & secure telephones etc. Poor people, not so much.
So, maybe privacy is not an automatic natural resource such as we thought it was. Maybe it’s something that needs to be cultivated, tended and protected by each person according to their ability.
Finally, yes, there is a massive infrastructure standing at the ready to dip to the bottom of our private lives for the benefit of industry and government. However, I’m not entirely convinced that this infrastructure has really been activated yet. The databases are bloated with information, but no one is searching them… yet.
These are the assumptions I’ve been living by. Hopefully, I’m not too off target.
May 8th, 2006 at 5:01 pm
My paranoid-recursive brain had fun with that one. I’ve got a new phone, too, that tells me the same thing. I came to the conclusion they are tracking you all the time anyway, even if they say you can turn it off. Otherwise how would the information get to 911? My paranoid mind decided it’d be better to leave location tracking on and not draw attention to myself. If I really don’t want to be tracked, I can just leave the thing at home.
May 8th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
Well, all I can say is check out the Wired article. That’s the most information I’ve seen about it so far.
I’d like to do more reading about what Zeno is saying above about privacy being a modern invention. I have this sneaking suspicion that it’s hooked into conceptually the concept of individuality, which I suspect is also a modern invention.
To refer again to that BBC Documentary, Century of the Self, it seems very much like individuality is something that has been intentionally promoted to break people down and isolate them from one another. But rather than just restoring closeness and collective identity, it seems that the destruction of privacy is going to be used ultimately to push people further and further into individualized worlds, as a sort of retreat from reality.
My own educated guess goes something like this: you’re no longer free to do or say things in the real world, so you get shunted off into virtual worlds (Second Life, etc) where you can be completely “free” and a supreme individual, the center of a universe you’ve completely created…
May 8th, 2006 at 5:13 pm
That reminds me of another good conversation I had recently which I’ll post about in a moment - relates to the sort of mental panic that you have when a cop walks by, even if you’re doing nothing wrong!
May 8th, 2006 at 6:58 pm
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/privacy/#1
Quick search on the history of privacy turned this up.
May 8th, 2006 at 7:04 pm
There was an article in one of the Disinfo anthologies about how privacy laws rose in as cameras became increasingly portable–newspaper photographers started getting incredibly close to people and photographing them at home, etc.
At the same time, many of the things that today fall under the words “privacy” and “individuality” existed before those concepts had coalesced into their modern, monikered forms.
Tim, are you a pisces moon sign? Regardless, to what degree does overt, explicit control matter when we live in a system of covert, implicit control? Any “social constructionist” could spend all day pointing out just how controlled we are. Is this maybe just a cyclical motion?
Absolutely, but it’s already pretty full-tilt, they’re just going to drop a new motor in the thing. There’s a guy I work with who got a reprimand because someone, in essense, stole a login and password and found pictures of the guy snorting coke on a passwored internet site. I think that’s an “invasion”, but then again, I think drugs should be legal, and that adults should be able to engage in consensual sodomy. I’ve been trying to believe that by losing privacy and entering a fully-observed society we’d all realize that “deviant” behavior isn’t all that atypical, but right now I’m only seeing evidence that it’s a means to reinforce the “typical.”
And at the same time, if increased survellience results in the deviants being actively persecuted, you’d accellerate the formation of No-Go zones and in fact strengthen deviant subculture into outright counterculture.
May 8th, 2006 at 7:10 pm
No, I’m a Capricorn with a Leo Moon and cancer rising. What makes you ask that question?
Excellent - freaking - question! I think you win the prize on this one.
May 8th, 2006 at 10:14 pm
Not true. Ever heard of data mining. A well developed area of research that interfaces between computer science and statistics. And well-used where I work (health research), but not as much as is used by marketing (and perhaps DARPA).
True, if your phone is off. But if it’s on, your phone is communicating with a cell phone tower that can triangulate your position to within about 300 feet I believe. (Maybe it’s more, but it’s certainly within a city block or two).
Welcome to the 21st Century spiritual challenge: how to “free” yourself from external influences and control. About as easy as freeing yourself from thought itself. Ask the Buddha how…
May 9th, 2006 at 7:47 am
True privacy is possible, but it’s not always easy. Anyone interested in privacy should read J.J. Luna’s book “How to be Invisible”“>”How to be Invisible” though.
May 9th, 2006 at 7:48 am
That link didn’t work. Let’s try again (feel free to delete this and fix the link above, Tim):
May 9th, 2006 at 7:49 am
I give up. Google it.
May 23rd, 2006 at 12:23 am
[…] Maybe I just saw these juxtaposed at exactly the right time, but you have to wonder: is there some place where these two technologies intersect? What about correlating the above technologies with those 460+ terabytes of information that Wal-Mart has been gathering about it’s customers? Or mash that into a ball with the NSA’s surreptitious attempts at social networking tools. What we seem to be looking at is not only complete tracking and monitoring of all individuals, but the very real attempt to do the same thing scientifically on a system-wide societal scale, projecting into the future, changing key variables… Ah, the possibilities make my head spin with terror and revulsion. […]
May 25th, 2006 at 12:03 pm
[…] Right now, a lot of people have links in their sidebars to books that they are reading, or music they are listening to. Imagine then that the books or CD’s themselves were transmitting this data - along with all other products you use, by way of RFID or similar technology. I think a lot of people in the conspiracy world tend to think of this type of thing in negative terms as surveillance or the creeping police state, but this post makes me re-think those assumptions. At some point, it’s like the government won’t need to upset people over wiretapping - because we will simply WANT products which track our every move and which can be correlated and used in interesting and creative ways both online and off. (Try also these two older posts in a similar vein if you’re interested in this subject…) Read Similar Articles: […]