Internet

You Have the Right to Privacy (So Long as you can Afford it)

I was just having another look at the now infamous Does What happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook presentation and it got me thinking about online privacy and what a paradox it is. Anything online is easily reproduced and propagated by virtue of the internet being digital and omnipresent in nature. It is therefore a medium which is fundamentally at odds with the idea of privacy because the preservation of privacy requires the existence of informational silos which limit said information from spreading too far.

The idea that the real world concept of these “contextual silos” which prevent information from spreading very far beyond it’s original context could be transferable to the web is flawed because digital information is ubiquitous. Anything on the web can potentially be seen by anyone, anywhere at anytime, whereas in real life a night of say, alcohol fueled revelry, would only be witnessed by people present at the event and would be known to only so many people outside those that were present. Furthermore, the internet is a repository of digital memories as opposed to human memories and so not only is nothing ever forgotten, nothing is ever romanticized either, everything is always recalled in exactly the same fashion which it was recorded.

So the notion of what happens on the Facebook staying on the Facebook is really quite unrealistic. Facebook, much like the internet itself, is designed to act like a giant database that allows other applications to interact with it and make use of it’s data repository. Furthermore, to think that Facebook could contain the information within it’s domain really misunderstands the fluidity of information on the internet. The web is a medium that excels at the reproduction and propagation of information. Nothing stays in any one place for too long, it is quickly duplicated, syndicated and diffused across the breadth of the entire world wide web.

I remember during the Gomery Inquiry (or adscam) concerning Canadian federal government advertising expenditures in Quebec that there was a publication ban. However, that didn’t stop an American blog, Captains Quarters, which by virtue of being American was not subject to the ban, from broadcasting information being passed on by a mole at the inquiry. Ultimately, over a million Canadians flocked to the blog during the ban. In the good old days of highly concentrated media such a blackout would have been very effective. Today, it’s pretty much useless. Information fundamentally doesn’t obey restrictions, borders or boundaries, it is only the means of distribution which can be controlled and since no one controls the internet, information does what’s it’s naturally inclined to do, which is to spread far and wide as quickly as the medium will allow.

The future is transparent, and the blurring and blending of the public and private will only accelerate. We are seeing and will continue to see, a startling amount of personal information being made available on the internet. Google searches dredge up more information than anyone could ever have imagined, Facebook is privy to personal information right down where to where someone is and what they are doing and how they’re feeling at a specific time, Youtube makes it such that any of us could be caught on camera anytime and broadcast to the world, zoominfo crawls the internet with it’s data aggregation engine and gathers all information it can find concerning an individual into one nice neat package, while namebase maps social connections between people even going so far as to color code the density of those connections (won’t be long before Facebook does something similar?) and overhear.us proposes to provide a forum for corporate gossip, making water cooler chat at companies everywhere potentially available for all.

People and organizations will have to pay for privacy in much the same way people pay today to keep their names out of the phone book. The velocity and the distribution of information is increasing and it will take more proactive actions to preserve privacy. I can see a burgeoning privacy protection industry in the not too distant future. Everything from educational materials and seminars on how to safeguard one’s privacy, to software packages, to whole companies devoted to actively monitoring and shaping their clientele’s image on the web. With better tagging, more intelligent searches capable of making linkages between information and virtually all information available in the digital realm, nothing will be difficult to find unless someone pays for the privilege of privacy.

Welcome to the digital panopticon.

⋅ May 8, 2007

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