In a disturbing article at the BBC News site, Michael Geist, an expert in Internet Law at the University of Ottawa, describes how technology is eroding the legal foundations of privacy:
privacy law has … emphasised the distinction between personally identifiable information – information that can be traced to a particular person and is therefore deserving of legal protection – and non-identifiable information that does not enjoy any legal protection. Technology threatens the ability to easily distinguish between the two as powerful computers and ever-expanding databases make it easier to identify individuals from what was once thought to be non-identifiable information.
This is what makes most of the “privacy protection” measures routinely rolled out by the internet giants little more than PR fluff. Even as they play up various techniques for “anonymizing” personal data, they are perfecting data-mining algorithms designed to see through anonymous information, to connect the dots back to you. Given enough data, enough computing power, and enough smart programmers, the term “non-identifiable information” becomes an oxymoron.
Hmm.. For some reason, I am reminded of an old interview I saw with Isaac Asimov. He said that everyone thinks computers are a threat to privacy, unless their name is “John Smith.”
Over five years ago, Scott McNealy put it rather simply: Get over it. You have zero privacy.. Take this example: combine the information offered by Zillow, Wikimapia and Addresses.com. Zillow has defined a simple number for almost all 70 million private homes in the USA. Just browse to a home (maybe yours!) and increment that number by editing the URL. They report the spelled-out address and, inside the HTML of the page, the latitude and longitude. It is easy to scrape out that kind of info from an HTML page. Do the reverse lookup on the address at addresses.com and combine the information and add to WikiMapia or its equivalent by creating a litte square tile for that house. Obviously, you could write a program in Java or Perl or Python to automate the process. You could quickly accumulate a map of your own neighborhood or any American neighborhood, complete with listed phone numbers. Real estate agents, mass marketers, and the like have had this kind of information for decades. Now, you too can have this information in a convenient format and perhaps even share it without anybody’s permission (well, you might have to license the datasets, but you get the idea). In a web site like WikiMapia, you could then treat each square as a wiki page and start to share what else you know (or feel like claiming) about who lives in the in that house and whether they are naughty or nice. Santa Clause must have that kind of info, right? Now you can too.
I remember a seminar at Google with that point in mind (they used to be available on G Video, but are probably on YouTube now): they are aware of it; the ingenieers came up with simple measures to make individual preference information unavailable. Indetity is evolving: it doesn’t make marketers worst person then they already are; for one, it would be difficult.
Oh, I forgot to mention: it is only getting worse. Soon, there will be nowhere to hide. Microsoft’s
Live Search Maps, with its “birdeye” view, already provides much higher resolution. It is aerial data (taken from a plane, not a satellite) by Pictometry. With those images, you can see individual branches of trees, individual panes of windows in houses and cars, and even lawn furniture. And from the four points of the compass. Just zoom in.
Personally, I am stil waiting for FPS video games that use real locations (maybe college campuses) to model the terrain on. You know, the real landscapes, the real roads, the real buildings. After that, you just have to add real cars, furniture and people and then you can learn a lot more about the real world around you in a somewhat safer virtual reality or Augmented reality. I predict that it is all coming soon to a PC near you.
Take this vision and listen again to Brad Patricks Berkman presentation. The take-home from this mature adult is: “The deeper the penetration of the technology, the deeper the penetration of the content, the more we have the ability to improve everyone’s lives.” There are already 3-D FPS games that are nearly 100% open-source, so the software is not the obstacle. This would be much more daring and powerful and hopefully beneficial (because it requires one to get comfortable with others knowing so much about us individually) than something like Second Life But if we do not do it nicely to ourselves, then somebody overseas will just do it to us. There is no escape here in the USA. Even though this country is in a state of war, we would not be willing to destroy our own civil rights and basic freedoms enough to stop this powerful and transformative technology (well, it more just further transform us further in busybody Internet-addicted couch potatoes, but that is the direction that Wikipedia already leads in) from becoming a permanent part of our near-future. Get over it.
When was the last time you used a current version of Google Earth? Google has already purchased building outlines for the downtown areas of major cities, but those models are just very-good exterior shells with photos of the outsides of the buildings applied. But Google Earth is encouraging users to build 3-D models (with a tool they provide), and donate those 3-D models back to the Google Earth web site and then everybody who chooses the right viewing options can see the information that you, as an amateur architect, provided. In other words, now you can go inside the buildings and maybe see something useful.
All the big pieces exist today for transformative Augmented Reality. It just requires some software cloning, integration and a LOT of donated data of various degrees of quality. It could become a Second Life that is based on a thick substrate of reality. Like Wikipedia, it could form a compelling, entertaining and educational environment, if managed properly. What it would require is mature, adult, judicious and wise management that is not afraid to charge forward into the future.
The genotype of James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure with DNA (and Rosalind Franklin helped also), just released his genotypeon the Internet. How long before that will be true for many other people? And how many people are already imitating JenniCam not for profit but “just because”? When many of us have devices updating a web site with the current GPS info on our bodies and in our cars, that Augmented reality will become even more interesting. When you walk down Main Street and stop outside of a restaurant and get, not just the menu, but the floor layout, what the current employees look like, info on the restaurant equipment they use, some employee genotypes, blah blah blah… then you see our inevitable future: anything that CAN be annotated in that augmented (demented? maybe) reality mostly WILL be annotated. The people who do not want to play the game will be viewed as living under a rock or out in the wilderness. The deeper the penetration… ah, I already mentioned that.
Because of human nature, I suspect that in that high-detail augmented/demented virtual reality of the near-future, the rules of the game will still be same.
Since the facts I present in some of my earlier posts may depress some of those (whom I have to share the oxygen and other limited Earth resources with) hoping not to see their privacy gradually dissolve into smaller and smaller cubes and volumes of ever-smaller distance dimensions on the geode, some levity is required for the sake of balance:Caption: Suddenly, just as Paul was about clinch the job interview, he received a visit from the Ghost of Usenet Postings Past.
The Doctor Fun comic series ceased in 1996. I admire Doctor Fun for this announcement: As promised, I somehow managed to finish 520 weeks or ten full years, even if it took a bit longer than ten years to get there. In my opinion, he did not jumped the shark, he simply had the judgment to keep a promise wisely made.
At the risk of monopolizing comments, I note that somebody posted a Java program that maps neighborhoods on the alt.privacy Usetnet group last Christmas. It received a warm reception. The same poster points out earlier in this Google Earth/Keyhole post that such address-to-latlong mappings have been publicly available for the last 10 years through the federal government. The data has been waiting for integration via mashups. Think of the savings in gasoline if, by browsing such a mashup, you discover a closer source for something you used to drive across town for. It is ironic that as your virtual vision and knowledge is expanded, the consequence might be less privacy for all, but the footprint that you leave on Earth both geographically and ecologically might become smaller. Ahh…it couldn’t be. Those are the failed dreams of those ’60s hippies living in those communes of theirs.