So, How Much is My Privacy Worth to Me?
Picture by Matthias Hornung via Wikimedia Commons
I’ll admit, I don’t worry a lot about my privacy. Clearly. I’m on Twitter. And Facebook. I share way too much of my personal information with people I think of as friends BUT THAT I’VE NEVER ACTUALLY MET IN PERSON! I write these columns and share tidbits of my life. If you’ve read them you know I watch a lot of TV, I have 3 cats, I’m divorced (bitterly) and I bought a new house last year. I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg knows more about me than I could possibly imagine. I use those store rewards cards so Kroger knows exactly what I’ve purchased. I put one of those do it yourself security systems in so I can see live feed from my living room.
But is there a limit to what I’m willing to share?
If so, that limit was tested yesterday when I got a call from my insurance agent. She must know that I’ve been shopping around for new insurance (which, first of all, is creepy) so she was calling to tell me that there were some discounts that I could be taking advantage of. Great! Let me have them! For one thing, I can take a 6 hour online safe driving course (at a cost of $20) that would earn me a discount. OK, fine. Send me the link and I’ll get around to it sometime.
The second thing she suggested was that I download their safe driving app. You know the one. You’ve seen the commercials. The woman is in labor and her contractions are 2 minutes apart but she’s screaming at her husband “Don’t mess with my discount!” as he’s frantically driving her to the hospital. Yeah, she’s gonna let her kid pee in his pants rather than speed up so he can make it to the bathroom on time.
I don’t want to be that woman.
Be honest, most of us are terrible drivers. I’m just honest about it. I make jackrabbit starts when the light turns green. I change lanes because I’m stuck behind some moron that insists on driving the speed limit (which will get you killed here in Atlanta.) I brake too hard. I avoid death on a daily basis because there’s always some moron pulling right out in front of you. And yet the only accident I’ve had in recent years was when some kid rear ended me when I was stopped at a red light. I’m guessing there was a cell phone involved.
I used to be even worse. I totaled my OWN car turning left in front of someone. I ripped the passenger side mirror off the car backing out of the garage too fast. Twice. I scraped the whole side of the car against a post trying to pull up to an ATM. I hit a post in the parking garage. And I finally backed into another car at the gym parking lot. I’ll never forget the guy at the body shop walking in circles around my car and asking HOW THE HELL had I managed to dent the car on ALL FOUR SIDES! Well, it took me more than one accident, obviously.
So, no. I’m not really anxious to hand over all the data about my driving to my insurance company. Honestly, I’m afraid that if I did they might cancel my policy rather than give me a discount. And what if that information gets hacked? What if I get some crazy stalker? I once got threatening emails after writing about the Klan and shortly after that my email was hacked. What if the government forces my insurance company to hand over all of my records? Of course, they could probably already get that information from my cell phone company.
Maybe I’m just paranoid. Maybe my insurance company genuinely wants to help me drive safer to protect me. Maybe it would be a useful tool. Like those fitness trackers people wear to remind them to get enough steps in a day. Or maybe it’s just one more step on our inevitable slide towards an authoritarian society where the government chips us like dogs and tracks every single movement we make.
Maybe I’m not paranoid enough to keep up.
One thing I’ve noticed about the loss of privacy is that it’s ostensibly voluntary on our part.* We choose to engage in certain activities that expose ourselves. Those include things like the car driving app you mention as well as, for example, the choice to use the internet, especially the choice to subscribe to an internet service at home.
You (or others) might say that just because it’s a choice doesn’t mean it’s not in some ways authoritarian. I’d agree with that.
But there are counterpoints to the claim that this is all a loss of privacy. For one thing, I suspect the loss of privacy in these situations is less than the loss of privacy attendant on living in a stereotypical small town, where everyone supposedly knows everyone else’s business. And now, even in that stereotypically small town (or a close-knit ethnic enclave in a big city, like the one I live in), we can do, errm, some things a lot more privately, thanks to Amazon and the internet.
Another counterpoint is that the type of privacy loss we’re faced with here is primarily either constrained a gamble with modernity.** It’s constrained because while Kroger knows what we buy, my neighbor probably doesn’t. It’s a gamble because we’re hoping we’re not one of the 3% (or whatever it is) people who’s information is hacked or that even if we are hacked, there’s some sort of insurance or compensation mechanism that lowers at least some of our liability. (I say “primarily” because there may very well be secondary or tertiary effects that go beyond the “constrained”/”gamble” way of looking at things.)
*I might as well shill my own post on the matter: http://hitcoffee.com/file/11249
**I hate that word, but it seems the right one here.Report
Some of my concerns come with, I guess you’d call it cross-platform sharing? So, like, the Kroger sends the information on what I buy to my health insurer, who suddenly starts sending me “nudges” about all the chocolate I eat and how I’d be better off with kale. Stuff that might fall under the heading of “concern trolling” but is creepier because it is an agency who has some say in things….or like, Twitter forwarding “data” from what I tweet to my doctor as a suggestion I might be depressed…that kind of stuff. Couple this with the suggestion of “red flag” laws (which could be horrifically misapplied) and, well….lots of people who did a lot actually-innocent stuff find themselves under suspicion.Report
Not ‘could be’, but ‘already are’. Expect a lot of those red flags to find themselves facing court challenges as unconstitutional for lack of due process.Report
Like Gabriel mentions, one point of view is that we are no more anonymous than we would have been in a small town where everyone knows everyone.
But a counterpoint is that in that old environment, people knew the rules of privacy and could exert some control. Like for instance, you knew that if you wrote a letter the outside was public information, but the inside was private. And if you heard a rumor you could assess its validity based on your knowledge of the speaker.
In the modern world we have lost the ability to understand the rules and control. Like right now, you really have no way of knowing who is browsing through your computer and web history, or who is hacking into your financial files.
You can use various types of firewalls and software protections, but for every locksmith, there is a lockpick.
This asymmetry is what is a bit unnerving, the realization that others can see us, but we can’t know who.Report
It’s been more than 20 years since I was writing internal white papers at a giant telecom about the end of personal privacy. The operating systems on personal computers were inherently insecure. The applications were buggy. Packets were transmitted without encryption. The federal government was opposed to letting us have strong encryption at all. No one had a clue about how to attach metadata to personal data that would indicate whether and how far it could be copied or how to enforce that.
We’re not that much better than we were then.Report
Before we had more modern tech, Lily Tomlin (Ernestine the operator) was all up in our business. 🙂Report
A very long time ago at a company far far away..I watched a demo of a program that was “ostensibly” only for law enforcement. All you needed was a name or phone number. The result was: address, licenses, credit data, census data, demographic info, # of folks in the house, mortgage info, you name it. Spider web lines to your know family members in other locales. All the same info above on them. The previous owner’s of the house you lived in and all the above info on them. This was over a decade ago.
We’re already screwed. I’m sure this program, or a modified one, is available for non leo now. I’ll never have a dongle to monitor my driving. If face, I won’t buy a car that has speed contrail on it. You know, the ones the Europeans are making. Won’t be long before they arrive in the US. I have a facebook account but rarely use it…no need to build a more complete profile. Periodically think about cancelling it….Report