This article was taken from the March 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
A writer who has shared his most intimate information online argues that pooling data is literally life-saving and humanity's next evolutionary step.
Panic about privacy has often been triggered by technology. When Gutenberg invented his printing press, authors of the day feared having their thoughts and identities recorded permanently and distributed widely. The first serious discussion of a legal right to privacy in the US came in 1890, with the invention of the Kodak camera and the rise of the penny press. Telephones, miniature microphones, video cameras and RFID chips all triggered much fretting. It should come as no surprise, then, that the internet would provoke warnings that privacy is dead, but those alarms will likely lead to more regulation of privacy than ever. We need protection of our privacy and we're getting it.
It's not privacy that concerns me now. It's publicness. I fear our supposed privacy crisis, reputed by the media and abetted by government, could result in our missing many of the opportunities the net affords to connect with each other and with information. In Germany, political and press frenzy on the topic led to 244,000 citizens exercising their Verpixelungsrecht, the right to have their buildings pixellated in Google Street View -- desecrating the digital landscape and setting a dangerous precedent: if Google can be told not to take pictures of public places, will citizens be censored next?
Germany's privacy chief also decreed that combining geocoding with facial recognition shall be "taboo". Does it make sense to forbid a technology before it is even used? I realise how the notion could sound creepy. But imagine how such a combination could help find missing people (or terrorists).
Half a billion people can't be wrong. That's how many of us share friends, photos, videos, activities, locations and romantic interests -- our lives -- on Facebook, plus much more on Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare, Blippy, blogs and social networks yet to be imagined. "The data suggest that people are self-violating their privacy at a humongous rate," Eric Schmidt told me. "The clear trend is for people to get value out of sharing more and more," Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview.
We are sharing because it brings benefit. We meet people, make friends and stay connected. We spread ideas. We get attention. We gather information. We gain trust through transparency. We collaborate through openness. We are learning how to use our new tools to organise movements. We cross borders. We entertain ourselves. We are served more relevant content and, yes, adverts.
We question authority.
That is precisely what the curmudgeons and incumbents of our legacy institutions fear. Publicness shifts control. Secrecy once granted power, now transparency does. Why else would so many governments and corporations be so afraid of Julian Assange? He compels the people's business to be conducted before the people.
WikiLeaks forces publicness. Facebook merely enables it. "Our mission," Zuckerberg said, "is to make the world more open and connected."
I live that open life. Not everything I do is or should be public; I especially want to be careful not to drag others into my glasshouse. Yet I have blogged, tweeted, published and broadcast about many experiences, including the most private: my penis and how it no longer functions after surgery for prostate cancer. Can't get much more public than that, now, can I? But good has come of it. I received support and information no doctor's pamphlet could supply. I inspired men to get tested. I helped others through surgery, people who would not have known to reach out to me had I not been public. I could bring attention to a disease that gets too little notice.
Publicness disarms stigmas. It provokes generosity. It increases knowledge. I have learned online how much is to be gained from sunlight. The internet is our new tool of publicness. It is vital we protect its openness and its power against censorship born of tyranny or overregulation born of the fear of the new. What's public is a public good. Diminish that and it is we, the public, who lose.
Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do? will publish his next book, Public Parts, later this year
Next page: Case studies...
CASE STUDY: TRACKING YOUR MOVES
With countless companies now tracking your data online, one question remains: who will watch the watchers? With the right software, you can. US firm Ghostery (ghostery.com), founded by serial web entrepreneur David Cancel in 2009 and subsequently bought by the Better Advertising group, is a browser add-on designed to reveal the web you normally don't see.
The service flags up a list of the tracking scripts embedded in a webpage, often hidden behind multimedia scripts such as Java and Flash. It then provides an in-depth profile on each so that you can monitor what information is being accessed and can block the script if you don't like the look of it. The application has already been downloaded over two million times, and has profiled more than 400 tracking companies. "We advocate a self-regulatory principle," says product manager Andy Kahl. "You can't just block everything. There must be a middle ground. Your data is valuable -- this stuff helps fund the web. But it needs to be done responsibly and people need to be aware of what's being done with their data."
Last year ex-Google engineer Brian Kennish created Facebook Disconnect (disconnectere.com), a browser extension for Chrome that allows users to remove Facebook Connect from third-party sites. It attracted 50,000 users in two weeks and made the top ten Google Chrome add-ons. Disconnect also prevents third parties such as Facebook, Google and Twitter from gathering data about the pages you visit and the search terms that you use. Kennish calls it "Web 2.1 -- a privacy patch for the web". Oliver Franklin
CASE STUDY: THE SPY IN YOUR POCKET
On August 19, 2010, Apple applied for a patent with the title "Systems and methods for identifying unauthorised users of an electronic device" (Apple's emphasis). The specs describe how a photo could be taken "without a flash, any noise, or any indication that a picture is being taken to prevent the current user from knowing he is being photographed." The iPhone (say) could record that user's voice and their keystrokes, similarly without their knowledge; the accelerometer could "determine the mode of transportation of the electronic device" to identify the "vibration profile for movement types such as running, walking, riding on a train, riding in a car, flying in a plane, or riding on a bike"; GPS could determine the user's position. The iPhone could even record an electrocardiogram of the user's heartbeat.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a US digital-rights group, described the patent as "traitorware". Apple told WIRED that it does not comment on patents.
On the other side of the Pacific, researchers from KDDI, a large
Japanese telecoms manufacturer, last year developed a phone that monitors manual workers' performance by analysing physical movement using accelerometers. KDDI says the tech will improve efficiency. Smartphones -- always with you, always internet connected and always geolocated -- may be privacy's greatest threat. Tom Cheshire
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
