Published: October 09, 2008 06:42 pm            

STAWAR: Is privacy possible anymore?

“You have zero privacy anyway. So get over it.”

— Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems

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As a kid back in the 1950s, I distinctly remember seeing the movie version of George Orwell’s novel “1984.” This film painted a bleak picture of a future, in which large observation screens were installed everywhere, to keep the population under the watchful eye of Big Brother. Big Brother, of course, was Orwell’s euphemistic symbol for the totalitarian regime that ruled Western Europe. Today within one block of the apartment where the novel was written, there are more than 42 closed-circuit television surveillance cameras. In total, the city of London has more than half a million of these devices.

Back when I was growing up, children were constantly threatened that any type of misbehavior could result in the details being recorded and kept in some hellish document known as “your permanent record.” Like J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI files, this dossier would follow you the rest of your life, ruining any chance at future happiness.

Over time, we learned that the destructive power of your permanent record was just another bogey man myth. We carefully noted that the older teenagers in our town, who got into serious trouble, often had their misdeeds quietly hushed up. Then they were unceremoniously shuffled off to the Army or were permanently ensconced in some low level municipal job, never to be heard from again. It seemed that the community had its own social-control methods for dealing with such indiscretions.

I am not sure that such a thing would be possible in today’s world. The information superhighway has way too much traffic. Not only does everyone have a permanent record, but literally any joker in the world with a computer has access to it. Today, fewer and fewer people are able to live completely off the information grid.

And many of us off are constantly trading away our dwindling privacy rights for insignificant financial incentives. For example, I give my grocery store the right to keep a detailed permanent record of everything I buy, just so I can get 3 cents off a gallon of gasoline. I always assumed that it used this information to better target its marketing to me, but the coupons I get at checkout and in the mail, never seem to be for any products that I might actually buy. Perhaps they have some sophisticated algorithm that tells them that since I buy so much Eddy’s Ice Cream, that I really need Lean Cuisines.

Today court records, financial information and personal data is readily available online. And besides official sources, technology has made it possible for anyone with a cell phone to capture your behavior and have it viewed globally in seconds.

One of the poster children for this frightening phenomena is a young South Korean woman, who back in 2005 refused to clean up after her dog, when the animal defecated on a subway train. A bystander caught the action on a cell phone and uploaded his pictures to a popular Korean Web site. Through these photos, the woman was eventually identified and quickly became the object of worldwide derision. Her resultant shame was such that she had to drop out of college and make a highly publicized and humiliating public apology. Worst of all, she has been permanently saddled with the unfortunate nickname of “dog poop girl.”

Blogger Daniel Balkin (at Balkin.com) says, “Forever, she will be captured in Google’s unforgiving memory; and forever, she will be in the digital doghouse for being rude and inconsiderate.”

Others also have the misfortune of their misdeeds suddenly going viral and instantaneously spreading across cyberspace. The use of the Internet to enforce social norms is a new and scary phenomenon that even Orwell could not have predicted. The new Big Brother is our friends, neighbors and every stranger with a cell phone or digital camera.

According to a national survey reported in Business Wire earlier this year, 83 percent of us say that ensuring the security of personal information is a top priority and 75 percent of us believe we know how to protect our personal information. But this survey also showed that there is little actual realization that everyday activities like entering a contest or completing a product warranty form can easily compromise personal information. My wife Diane wisely refuses to routinely give store clerks our phone number or zip code, but I find myself blurting it out before I realize what I am doing.

In the October Harvard Business Review, writer Lew McCreary describes one of the growing number of people who try to stay off the digital grid by keeping their informational profiles as low as possible. They pay for everything in cash and withhold as much personal information as possible, to the extent of using false names when making purchases and completing forms. This particular man even belongs to a local group of people who routinely trade old store discount cards, so no accurate profile can ever be established.

On the other hand, many people from the millennial generation are deeply involved in online social networking, to an almost exhibitionistic degree. It is not unlikely that youthful indiscretions that are posted online, like an ill considered tattoo, may come back to haunt many young people in the future, threatening relationships, reputations, and even jobs. With Internet technology such as “The Way Back Machine,” some Web content may turn out to be virtually immortal — a truly permanent record. This development may require a degree of caution from young people never before experienced.

Brad Stone recently wrote in Newsweek about a student at a Vermont college, whose internship was threatened because his Facebook web page had a photo of him holding a bottle of liquor. The company was concerned that the student was not only breaking state drinking laws, but also demonstrated incredibly poor judgment by posting the photo in the first place. This college, like many others, now provides tips for social-network correctness through its career counseling department.

As far back as 1998, then vice president Al Gore called for an “electronic bill of rights” for an “electronic age” to guard us from the misuse of personal information gathered through computers. While some protections have become laws, like limits on the use of social security numbers for identification, we are still our own worse enemies when it comes to divulging personal information.

While most of us have learned not to send our credit card number to the Nigerian Minister of Oil, we still provide plenty of personal data in other ways. I am just glad that digital technology came around later in my life or who knows what nickname I might have ended up with.



Terry L. Stawar, Ed.D. lives in Georgetown and is the CEO of LifeSpring, the local community mental health center in Jeffersonville. He can be reached at tstawar@lifespr.com or 812-206-1234. Check out his Welcome to Planet-Terry podcast at www.lifespr.com/podcast.

        

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