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Privacy lost, anytime, anywhere

The loss of privacy is on the fast track, and the Internet is an all too willing co-conspirator. At every turn, more and more of the details of our public and private lives are in some way made "fit" for online consumption. The range is staggering, the results and ramifications unpredictable.

When some enterprising individual put the state of Oregon's entire Department of Motor Vehicles records into a searchable Web site, the residents of Oregon went ballistic. Seems not everyone was pleased their neighbor could, with a few mouse clicks, discover how many speeding tickets or drunk driving violations they had. The public hue- and-cry swiftly traveled downhill, and the Web site was junked.

From Texas comes word of a Web site (http://www.publiclink.com) allowing anyone to search the state's 17 million registered drivers - by drivers license number and by license plate. A lawyer in Dallas, where the company running the site is headquartered, reports on an Internet mailing list that the company plans to take the concept national.

And there are now whispers of several states planning to put their sex-offender databases on the Web. Kansas already has three such local registries online, all fully keyword searchable. The data provided include at least name and address. Although I can brook with such registries being maintained at the local level, putting them online is simply using the Web as a blunt instrument. Add to that the fact that law enforcement agencies in Kansas are absolved of any harm should inaccurate data be placed in the database and you have all the makings for vigilantism and the potential for disaster. Indeed, this sort of thing happened recently in North Carolina, where a family, including the kids, was needlessly harassed because their address was listed as the home of a known sex offender. Small problem: The sex offender left town long ago, but his name was not deleted from the local database. Now imagine the potential for disaster a wacko with a jones for letter bombs and a self-righteous crusade against sex offenders might wield if these sex-offender registries were available online.

Just as disturbing is the growing trend of hanging a digital video camera off a PC and having whatever the lens happens to view be broadcast through the Web. To appreciate just how rapidly we are becoming a "nation of the cammed," crank the word "cam" into any search engine. You can then fill several hours browsing any number of "cammed" sites.

Web cams are simply the latest update in the technological arsenal assaulting our privacy - led by corporate America working with local, state, and Federal governments.

Our privacy, or what is left of it, is slowly, unmercifully being eaten away, like a digital-privacy virus. Things have progressed so even our daily shopping routines can be tracked from grocery aisle to check-out counter to the next store. If that sounds farfetched, consider that A.C. Nielsen, the TV ratings folks, have already received a patent for just this type of video surveillance system. The Nielsen patent says it will marry sophisticated facial recognition software with data from the check-out counter.

No Harm, No Foul?

Surprisingly, there is no overarching federal law regarding the use of video surveillance. A smattering of  state laws  address some of the most nefarious uses of video, such as the presence of cameras in public restrooms and department store dressing rooms. But these are by no means widespread nor uniform. Only one state, Connecticut, has any kind of prohibition against video surveillance at the corporate level, according to Surveillance, Incorporated, published last year by the American Civil Liberties Union. That means your employer is essentially free to put video cameras in locker rooms, restrooms, even your office, without your knowledge.

Most people don't give a second thought to whether they are on camera, knowing the "usual suspects" where cameras lurk: banks, department stores, courthouses, federal buildings. But do you think about the Web cam, hanging off someone's PC, broadcasting your lunchtime rendezvous in the park with whomever to anyone on the Web? I bet you don't. Why not? Because even in a public park, you, like me, have some expectation of privacy. Certainly not privacy from passers-by, but you don't expect to be seen on millions of small screens.

Robert Ellis Smith, editor and publisher of Privacy Journal, says people have "become pretty resigned" to video surveillance, and a Web cam is merely "more of the same" surveillance they get in other places. The public, he says, "becomes desensitized to this sort of thing."

Smith hits the problem dead on; people become complacent and apathetic. He adds that people "unconsciously take less risk" when they believe they are always on camera, "because they want to please the bland middle knowing they are on camera somewhere."

Do-Gooder Video

I'm not going to argue that some amount of video surveillance isn't a good thing. Who can forget that grainy black and white footage of a shopping mall video camera in England capturing two young boys leading a toddler by the hand away from the mall. The two older kids beat the little one to death. Without the video footage, the murder might have gone unsolved.

"As a former law enforcement official, I say it's great that we catch people because of video tape," says Clifford Fishman, a professor of law at Catholic University and former New York City prosecutor. "But the idea," he adds, "that anyone with a video camera and a sophisticated hookup can beam pictures to the Web is very troubling. It's an attack on our values and quality of life. My sense of privacy has been invaded, even if my legal right to privacy hasn't been."

That quality-of-life factor is bigger than one might expect. Yet there are those who advocate the total abolition of privacy. One is David Brin, an author who believes that unless everyone has a video camera beaming anything and everything to whomever 24-hours a day, governments and law enforcement types will take complete control of the technology and use it for repressive purposes. "Those with access to them [video surveillance cams] will have devastating advantages," Brin told Wired in an interview in the February 1996 issue. "The only alternative is to give the birdlike power of sight to everybody."

But in Brin's world, we are all one huge experiment. He hopes our future "video world" will handle this loss of privacy with civility and decency. Fat chance.

Brin's no-privacy world will create only a new category of criminal: the privacy outlaw, who commits acts of intentional privacy. Forget the militias; people will take to the hills to be "blanks," as privacy outlaws were called in the old "Max Headroom" TV series. Blanks will fight to keep their names, images, and vital statistics out of the public eye, both analog and digital. As privacy outlaws, they will be hunted down, maybe by privacy "buzz bombs," small, disposable airborne video cameras launched by the Feds for the specific purpose of ferreting out privacy criminals.

What Brin and his ilk do not address are the psychological factors of a world with no privacy. Some segments of the population will simply give up, becoming a part of a larger, bio-tufu mass. Their lives will be bland and subdued, resigned to having their every move recorded. Some will flip out, cracking like an overheated chestnut. They will feel like they are caught in a kind of "ratropolis" experiment in which scientists watch rats uncontrollably breed themselves into overcrowded fits of cannibalism during instinct-induced, population-control feeding frenzies.

Then there will be those - governments and corporations - striving, at all costs, to maintain absolute control of various surveillance methods. And they will succeed.

No Debate, No Privacy

What troubles me about Web cams and the more powerful video-surveillance cameras is that there is little, if any, debate about whether such practices are good for our society as a whole. No one seems concerned. No one seems shocked or outraged. Why not?

Perhaps Brin is right. Perhaps when all people have the same video capabilities, everyone will feel accountable, and that's good. All accountable on the same level, and pigs will fly some day, I'm sure.

The difficulty, says law professor Fishman, is "There is no significant lobby agitating for protection" from video surveillance. "There is no well organized, high-powered lobby trying to protect citizens from video cameras" or Web cams.

But there must be debate. Without debate, the laws, or lack thereof, will evolve in lock step with those - governments and corporations - with vested interests in the marginal benefits of the technologies.

You may feel comfortable allowing privacy to rush headlong into the toilet. Not me. I want a raucous privacy revolution played out in living color. And at the rate things are going, this is sure to be one revolution that will be televised, somewhere, somehow coming soon to a Web cam near you.

BROCK N. MEEKS ([email protected]) is chief Washington correspondent for MSNBC on the Internet.

Source Citation   (MLA 7th Edition)

Meeks, Brock N. "Privacy lost, anytime, anywhere." Communications of the ACM Aug. 1997: 11+.General OneFile. Web. 22 Oct. 2015.

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