A Century After 1984

One of my managers at Best Buy and I once got into a break-room conversation about his new Android phone. “I can sit here, and eat, and I don’t even have to touch the phone,” he said, “I can just say ‘OK Google,’ while you still have to push a button,” referring to my iPhone. Well, this presented a question for me. I was already privacy-aware those last few weeks having got into some discussions in the past about the privacy policy associated with Windows 8. “So the phone is listening to you all the time?”

“Don’t believe all that conspiracy bull****. The NSA doesn’t care about you.”

Whether or not it is true, today, doesn’t mean it won’t be true in 10 years. And citizens will have signed away their consent to have their privacy chipped away at. That is the most important thing, to remember: it will be consensual. Consumers agree to sign up for grocery store loyalty card programs, which give those retailers the ability to track your data. And, this can be done in many useful ways. As a result, I do this myself. For them, it supports their business, allows them to reduce spoiled inventory by predicting the shopping patterns of their customers. For more nefarious uses, however, it can be used to gauge all sorts of demographic data: religious affiliation, political beliefs, or in the famous case of Target, even whether or not you are pregnant. Algorithms are brilliant.

Ideally, whether most of us like it or not, it is important to our constitutional rights that any of this information extracted from us be legally obtained, through our consent. As an American, I have the right to travel lawfully and without impedance within the borders of these United States. As you can see on Youtube, immigration control checks exists within the US border, up to 100 miles from the border. They are random and done strategically to try to screen illegal immigrants. However, any American, driving lawfully through a checkpoint, doesn’t even need to state their citizenship, or show their ID. Unless a law enforcement officer states you are being detained as a suspect to a crime, they can’t force you to reveal that information. You do not have to tell them what your business is. You do not have to tell them where you are going. If an officer asks “are you a US citizen?” you can merely reply “am I free to go?” and that is perfectly legal. For them to arrest you or detain you without probable cause, is illegal. And while proponents of immigration checks find that frustrating, it is critical to our freedoms. Those freedoms do not likely extend during international travel, and as such I don’t have much comment on the TSA, except to say their record of performance is disappointing. As US citizens, we can of course support our local law enforcement by volunteering information, and I do. Occasionally (2-3 times a year) I will usually find some cause to call law enforcement to alert anything from gunshots I have overheard to a couch abandoned in the left lane of I-95. And I don’t mind if an officer asks about my goings on, I will gladly answer as a gesture of support to his work. But I am not legally obligated.

Other Youtube activists also get in trouble for recording in public. In one example, a public citizen on a public street took photographs of his local Sherriff’s Department. Sherriff’s argued with the man on the street for several minutes, trying to force him to stop his recording, and present ID. None of what the man was doing was illegal. Presumably at the end of the clip when recording stops, however, he is detained. I am curious to the aftermath of that encounter. Other examples, (many others) all underline one important fact: everyone (including Law Enforcement) is uncomfortable with the culture of public surveillance. (The officer at 1:10 in this clip, just makes my day by the way. Some people get it.)

That encounter raised a troubling question about surveillance. How much surveillance are we really willing to accept as lawful? Consider, that if you have a conversation in public, on a public street, you have no legal expectation of privacy. Correct? The problem is physics. Sound, light, heat, they all travel over significant distances. While the human ear cannot pick up a conversation behind your neighbor’s closed door across the street, for instance, does that really mean that the sound energy from your conversation is not traveling? This was the same argument Google ran into, in its legal battle concerning Street View cars, which not only collected location and light-wave (visual) public domain data, but also collected electromagnetic signals as well: they were mining data about residential Wi-Fi, and cataloging it. Electronic signaling is currently protected by the Wiretap Act, to my understanding. But what should be both fascinating and disturbing, is that Wi-Fi signals, among other things, can actually be used to track movement. Studies have indeed been conducted which can track whether someone is moving around in their home, for instance, where the Wi-Fi signal is emanating. This is because the human body is an impedance on the wireless signal. Currently, the precision is very poor, and it can tell what room you may be in, but that is precision enough surely.

What begins to happen when devices are made which are so sensitive that they can pick up and processes all sound energy which emanates from a large, public radius? It is worth thinking about. But more than likely, would never be accepted by the population at large. Not today, at least.

Let’s look at all the ways that technology can be used to mine data:

• Your Phone: this can pick up your location data, and microphone and visual input. Through user consent and product privacy policies, in some cases consumers allow these devices to know their location which is quite common, and on an increasing basis allows the phone to constantly listen out for the user’s voice input (such as “OK Google,” which can later be extended to be anything, in theory, such as “Bomb,” or other key phrases like “Heroin”, “Rifle”, “******”, etc.). This is in addition to the phone’s web capabilities, including phone conversations, text, and email.
  
  
• Your Doctor: this is probably the most closed-loop in your life, currently. It is unknown (and perhaps unlikely) that this data is being used in any way maliciously. You agree for your doctor to store your medical data and share aspects of it with insurers and other providers within the said network. Potentially, data from medical databases could be processed to discern a wealth of information about the public (such as obesity rates, spread of infection, etc) to more accurately determine medical supply and research demands. That the government cannot even get the V.A. to function correctly, leads one to feel that this is not a clear and present danger to privacy.
  
  
• Your Store: you agree to a myriad of loyalty programs. Companies offer you rewards and incentives for joining. They mark their store products at higher prices for non-involved members (it can be perceived to be a “discount” but that holds about as much truth as “cash prices” at gas stations). In return they get the data mentioned previously, and in turn you get those discounts, or discounts on gas, or whatever have you. Ideally, a system such as this should be tied into product recalls, with affected purchasers of items being automatically contacted, but this does not seem to happen. Some companies such as Best Buy do offer to share your purchase history with you, which is substantially more than what grocery stores currently offer their customers. This also helps those customers track when they bought their electronics, usually for the purposes of making claims on manufacturers warranties and accidental protection they may have purchased that goes beyond what those manufacturers provide. For that matter…
  
  
• Your products: you register your brand new rice cooker with an obscure rice cooker company. No big problem here. At least 2 other people in the loop already know about your purchase, like your credit card company, and the retailer. Registering products has a low potential for malicious use.
  
  
• Your car: this one is very tricky. Most cars on the road today have electronics in them which, for the most part, are closed loop. Going forward, however, most cars will likely be constantly synced to location data, which will be shared in all likelihood with the vehicle manufacturer on an ongoing basis, and any third party programs you use such as Sirius satellite radio and OnStar. But more cars will come with features like basic navigation or even satellite radio as standard, perhaps even mobile web access as the technology progresses. Plus, it is only a matter of time before vehicle “black boxes” become normal, which with all the other data a car can provide through rear-view and 360-degree parking camera features, and dash-cameras, can tack virtually all the guesswork and determination of fault out of a collision. Supreme Court battles have already been waged about law enforcement’s ability to trespass on a suspect’s driveway to install GPS tracking on his vehicle (without a warrant, at that) (United States v. Jones, 2012).
  
  
• Your television: in the 90s, it was an oft-rumored theory that your TV was spying on you, that it was bugged. And, this idea was made popular in Orwell’s 1984. Enter the Smart TV. The Smart TV is web enabled, and in some cases come equipped with Web cameras for video calling. Nifty! The future! But also kind of intimidating. These TVs can also process and determine what channel’s you’re watching, and use that information in relation to television ratings and the like. I’m more or less OK with that. But, I also do not own a Smart TV, nor do I watch television – it’s an expensive waste of my energies.
  
• Your appliances: Samsung, back from making the Smart TV, started making Smart Appliances. Your washing machine can send you alerts when your laundry needs to be rotated. Refrigerators can tell you when your milk is about to go off – in theory. A DIY hacker recently created a microwave that can read product barcodes and determine the appropriate cook setting for that product. However, that also means that somewhere, a database knows what flavor HotPocket you had for lunch, and what time you were in your home today. Between that and other home activity information, it’s a wonder if in 50 years a government won’t have the ability to just “know” when you’re not home, and do a warrantless search of your home?
  
• Fitness and Wearable Devices: Certainly this includes phones, most newer ones having more advanced sensors in them than just a few years ago (like Apple's M5 Co-Motion Processor in it's iPhones), there are also devices like FitBit, Misfit Shine, and others, that can record your pulse, activity levels, even when you sleep and how well you sleep. This information is synced to an online service in virtually all cases, and that removes under some Supreme Court decisions, your right to privacy of that data, as it currently stands.

Now, this is where things start to get scary: The Internet.

Recently, Microsoft put out some new terms and conditions. The actual contract is exhaustively huge. They offered to summarize it in layman’s terms: “As part of our ongoing commitment to respect your privacy, we have updated the Microsoft Services Agreement to state that we do not use what you say in email, chat, video calls, or voice mail, to target advertising to you. Nor do we use your documents, photos, or other personal files to target advertising to you.”

Wow.

What they’ve really said here is “we have access to these.” And they do. I use Skype. I use OneDrive. If Microsoft wanted, or the NSA had a cause to, they can probably go right into my online folder and look at my code for my spring project final. If I started collecting and storing a bunch of nuclear weapon schematics on my OneDrive, I wonder how long it would be before they took a serious interest in what kind of ice cream I had bought? It’s Reese’s Peanut Butter.

And I can see the logic here from a security standpoint, you don’t want someone replacing the finale at a fireworks display with a dirty bomb (and boy, is that ever why security is heightened around the 4th of July, among other things). What’s more, what about someone buying large quantities of propane, blowtorches, fertilizer, from home improvement stores? Theoretically, what if someone wasn’t on the loyalty programs, but purchased separate amounts of each at different Lowe’s locations, and a Home Depot and an Ace Hardware? With enough technological oversight and processing power, if the suspect used the same credit card in each transaction, those databases could be pooled together to piece together the image of someone making bombs. More than likely, that level of interconnectivity doesn’t yet exist. And, should it? Perhaps we want someone alerted when our neighbor is potentially building things to kill us.

There is no good way to stop the roll on of technology, so let’s rule that out. HP just created a computer than can process hundreds of terabytes of data in seconds. Let’s assume that the capability will exist for a central entity to be able to, in the future, be able to extrapolate this level of detail. Should be be afraid?

Whether or not we fear that change, one thing is clear: we should be legally protected in our right to be free of it. Anyone, should have the right to go live off the grid. Which of course means shedding that technology, but that is the price of it. Credit cards, phones, email, all of it can be used in some way to take your privacy. But, to be fair, you trade it. You trade it for convenience. Just like man trades something of his for something of someone else’s in our most basic units of community. We as a people are not by nature geared toward isolation.

To that end, I would like to always be a proponent of that legal right to privacy. However, as a futurist, I acknowledge that I am exchanging my own privacy for the intent of progress. I am OK with my grocery store improving its business practices through its data gleaned from me. I am OK with Microsoft being in possession of my data, by necessity of the system, in order to sync my documents across my multiple devices and locations. I am OK with my phone processing my data in exchange for providing me the reciprocating data that I am looking for. I am against the use of my data for malicious means, but I acknowledge that as we progress technologically, we are going to be far more connected than we are even now.

Thinking centuries down the path, humans will be exploring our solar system, colonizing stellar bodies, and hopefully probing our nearby star systems. If we haven’t already killed each other. The only way we can accomplish any of that is by understanding each other: understanding what makes us all different and unique, but by necessity, also understanding what we are all doing, and how we are doing it. Just as individual cells of a human body need to cooperate and interact to make the body function, for the species to take its step into space, humans need to function together as cohesive organisms, closely linked to one another, to achieve common goals. It is probably not something to shy away from, even if it is, today, incredibly terrifying to fathom.

Thanks for reading.