privacy threat

I’ve recently spent a couple of very nice days walking through London with a friend. During these walks, we talked about many interesting issues. One of them was the precariousness of privacy in the Internet age. All started because this friend told me that he was going to close his Facebook profile. He was afraid that at his place of work someone might find out something about his private life which could damage his reputation.

In case you haven’t heard yet about it, Facebook is a web service which allows the user to do networking as well as keeping in touch with friends. People create a personal profile on it which can contain a lot of personal information such as hobbies, work info, studies background, political opinions and photos. This personal profile is linked to the profiles of the person's acquaintances. The problematic aspect comes into the picture here, since these acquaintances are of all kinds: from childhood friends to work colleagues. Therefore people who you just have a formal relationship with may learn details about your personal life. That's why my friend said he no longer wants to risk somebody who works with him finding out something inappropriate about him.

And he might be right. The more we get involved in internet activities and communities, the more exposed our personal life becomes. Think about a person with a Myspace and Facebook profile, with his personal photos stocked on Flickr, who stores his browsing links on Delicious, and who regularly writes on a blog. If someone would take a bit of effort to track this person on the Web, he could easily end up composing a very accurate picture of what this person is like without having ever met him.

It is true that you can use false names, and that you can set the configuration options of these web services to permit a higher degree of privacy. But even so, from the moment you start publishing information on the internet you can't be 100% sure that nothing is going to get leaked. The risk that some of your data escapes your control is real.

So unless you have been really careful when interacting on the Web, the prospect appears scary: one day the employer of your dreams, while considering hiring you, will decide to google your name as a final check, only to discover those compromising pictures of you that a friend posted to your Myspace profile. Or maybe, having a look at your Facebook groups, he could learn that you belong to that minority communist party. Or what is even worse: he could find out that you are one of those pervert homosexuals!

I’m afraid this scenario is not that far-fetched. As for myself, I’ve always enjoyed looking up my acquaintances’ names on Google and I can state that recently it is becoming more and more common to find at least two or three entries for any person you search for. So, yes, in the short term, I have to agree with my friend: it is probably a good idea not to put too much personal information on the internet if you are to get involved with conservative work environments where people care about such things.

However I think that this struggle for preserving privacy is doomed to fail in the long run. Trying to erase all your traces on the internet is becoming more and more difficult, up to the point that, in a foreseeable future, it will be virtually impossible. The Web 2.0. services that I’ve just mentioned (Flickr, Youtube, Myspace, Delicious, Wikipedia, Facebook, Blogs, etc.) are only the beginning. The future development of the internet is all about sharing information of every sort.

But everyone has secrets to hide. Who wants to be known by people he hasn’t even met? Being so exposed is quite problematic indeed, so what can we do to deal with this new threat?

One of the solutions could be to fight. That is, to try to protect one’s movements on the internet in every possible way. On the one hand, by using data protection technologies, and on the other asking the people who govern our societies for legal support. That's why there will probably be attempts to legislate in order to protect the right of privacy (In a very similar way to that which is happening today with the fruitless attempts to protect copyright. Since the appearance of the P2P platforms such as Napster or Emule, the legal initiatives to stop the sharing of music and video have proliferated, always with the same unsuccessful results: the free exchange of copyrighted data rises steadily).

But all that will be like trying to prevent the tide from coming in. Just think about all those mobile phones with photo cameras (whose latest generation allows you to take really high resolution pics); the mobiles with high resolution video cameras are expected to appear soon as well. And it is pretty sure that all these amateur photographers and filmmakers will be very keen to broadcast their recordings online. To make things worse, there are even people who are starting to record all their conversations on Messenger and Skype. And in the meantime, Gmail and the new mail services promise that you will be able to store the totality of your emails during your whole life. In brief, our digital print is getting huge, it will soon become uncontrollable.

The other possibility is the solution formulated by David Brin in his book “The Transparent Society”. He asks us to think about the problem with a radically new optic. Instead of the hopeless efforts to protect privacy, he proposes that society forbids privacy itself. Or in other words, that society legalizes the possibility for everyone to watch each other.

The problem of having your private life exposed appears when there is an asymmetry, says Brin. That is, when your potential watcher doesn't have his life exposed as you do. This asymmetry gives peoples an advantage or disadvantage when interacting with others. But from the moment when everyone can get to know everything about anyone else, the equilibrium is reestablished. If my boss knows that I am one of those pervert homosexuals, but I know that he pays Brazilian transsexual prostitutes to penetrate him... then everything is cool, man!

What’s more, as a matter of logic, the more powerful an individual is, the more observed his movements will be. And this would have a positive effect on democracy. For example: would the war in Iraq ever happened if all the phone conversations between those Bush, Cheney, Blair and Murdoch had been public from the very first moment that they were taking place?