Technocreep (28 page)

Organizations are definitely willing to make the effort to track us, and the more they do this, the easier it becomes for them. In fact, we often enter the data for them ourselves. We have also learned that everyone's Internet traffic is of interest to the security establishment and, for that matter, to some corporations.

Every time you buy a book, “Like” a Facebook post, ”Friend” someone, send an email, or even log on to the Internet from a different place, you are leaving a digital trail that's being scrutinized to learn more about you. And while human relationships may come and go, your online presence is forever and can be monetized in ways you may not have considered.

I'm not doing anything wrong, so I don't have anything to ­worry about.

Just because you are innocent does not mean you are going to appear that way to authorities. A police officer once told me about a man who routinely parked his car in stall #11 of a parking lot. Unbeknownst to him, the guy who parked in stall #12 was a major organized crime figure. They often exchanged “good mornings” and that was enough to get the occupant of #11 placed in a police computer as a “known associate” of the Mafioso under investigation. Information about you can be incorrect, incomplete, or misleading. In 2006, a Canadian woman was denied entry to the U.S. because she had once attempted suicide, raising a furor that confidential Canadian medical records were being shared with U.S. agencies.
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Investigation shows that the linkage was probably through law enforcement records.

Another woman had difficulty obtaining credit because her file stated she had appeared in small claims court. She argued that she was the plaintiff, and had won her case. However the company holding the record refused to add that notation so she continued to suffer. These stories serve as a chilling reminder that any skeletons in your closet, no matter how ancient, may be dragged up at any time by databases that never forget.

Computers don't really understand me so I will always be able to stay a step ahead of them.

It doesn't matter if machines truly “understand” us; sometimes humans don't understand us either. Google Search and Gmail probably don't comprehend your whole personality in the same way as your spouse, but they know you in a different way. Your search engine may have a much better idea of precisely what you are interested in at this very moment. Since commerce ultimately happens in the present, that information is probably more useful from a business viewpoint than whether you're a Buddhist, a Baptist, a Jew, or a Jain.

Though that would not be hard to figure out either. Your metadata might show you calling or visiting a certain church, or your checking account might show a lot of $18, $36, and $180 donations, the favorite Chai numbers for Jewish donors. The other factor is that tremendous progress is being made in machine learning and artificial intelligence. As this privacy singularity meets the Vinge/Kurzweil artificial intelligence singularity … the outcome is, almost by definition, unknowable.

In 1984, when Dr. Duncan Chappell and I were writing our CBC Radio IDEAS
Series Crimes of the Future,
we picked up on some emerging crimes like identity theft and traffic in human organs that have since become household words. On the other hand, we predicted that by the early 21st century, people would be routinely using electricity to stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain for recreation. Many new drugs have emerged since 1984, but “wireheading” is still a fringe technology. And, of course, in writing the programs, we completely missed the importance of a little something called “The Internet,” which was then in its infancy.

In the inevitable gap between my writing these words and you reading them, new and even more disturbing facts about technology will have emerged. We will know more about what the NSA can do. We will learn more about how companies are burrowing into our psyches in the interest of competitive advantage. More smartphone stalking applications will appear. The whole area of biological manipulation will probably grow at an exponential pace.

Some of tomorrow's headlines will be more extreme examples of creepy technologies described in this book. Others may take us in entirely new directions. Only in retrospect can we know which ones are so creepy that people simply refuse to use them. And, of course, some will be well beyond our control as individuals, and require a higher level of intervention. Many of the creepiest aspects of new technologies will be hidden from our view, and we will only catch the occasional glimpse of them.

Perhaps the creepiest aspect of our relationship with technology is the misguided belief that we can have the benefits of new technologies without the risks. Just as there is no pleasure without pain, and no peace without war, we will always need to question the cost, the risk, and the motivation of those who may benefit from changing our lives through technology.

It will not be easy. One thing is certain: we will need to continuously make decisions on both the individual and societal levels. Long before there were viral cat videos, there was a newspaper ad offering “Free to Good Home” your choice of a playful kitten or a “handsome husband, good job, but says he doesn't like cats and the cat goes or he goes.” The ad then suggested “come and see both and decide which you'd like.” It is almost certainly a good natured joke between spouses who really care for each other. Yet taken literally, it nicely sums up the intensity of the hard choices we will need to make:

• Every time we post a photo on Facebook, retweet on Twitter, buy a plane ticket online, or even search for one, we are making personal privacy choices that have consequences.
  
• When we vote for political candidates with particular views on the issues raised in
  Technocreep
  , we are making societal decisions that have consequences. We can also vote with our wallets, ­choosing the most privacy-friendly technologies.
  
• As we talk to our friends, our co-workers, and our children about Technocreepiness, we are taking a stand about the kind of future we want to see.
  

If you are left with feeling that the world is spinning out of control, you've been paying attention. There is, however, some very good news. There are some concrete ways to minimize the impact of invasive technologies on your life and those of the ones you love.

But you have to start now. Let's do exactly that.

Picture yourself suddenly living in the most repressive, repulsive, privacy-unfriendly country on earth. Imagine how such a society could nefariously use the technologies that we so readily embrace against us. How those in charge could track us, hunt us down, link us to our friends, draw subtle inferences, and, ultimately, make our lives virtually unlivable.

Think how much you would regret posting certain photos, connecting with people online, and making certain purchases. How incriminating your travel history might appear. Perhaps you once did a Google search on a politically incorrect topic or even looked up “how to kidnap a celebrity” while watching a crime show on TV. You're in big trouble now.

Most people still behave as if we live in the polar opposite of this world—a free, open, democratic society where we can placidly enjoy the many advantages of new technologies. The truth is that we are actually somewhere between these two paradigms, and slipping rapidly towards the scarier one. There are things you can do to throw people off your cyberscent and retain as much privacy and freedom as possible, but you do need to start taking action now.

In researching and writing
Technocreep
, three things became very clear:

1. The technological capability to spy on us is becoming more sophisticated, less expensive, and more widely available.
Any shopkeeper can buy a $50 camera to watch and record the actions of customers. Malls and even whole cities can grab information on us from the unique identifiers inside our cell phones. Facial recognition technology is progressing so fast that soon you won't need to give your name: your face will identify you at the cashier's till or even in a crowd.

2. The motivation to use this technology is becoming more and more compelling.
Governments, corporations, and even nosy neighbors are starting to feel that “more is better” when it comes to data, and “if we can collect it, we should.” The cut-throat competition between online, brick-and-mortar, and hybrid retailers has fueled an “anything goes” mentality of massive data collection, archiving, resale, and brokering. A new breed of “data scientists” is starting to rule the roost, as businesses smell profit in techniques like collaborative filtering, long tail personalization, and sophisticated suggestion algorithms.

3. There is a tremendous variation in how well individuals guard their privacy.
Some people are using email anonymizers, Tor (The Onion Router), and multiple layers of post office boxes to cover their tracks. One fellow I know was prevented from accepting a volunteer position at a charity casino because he refused to divulge his (real) birth date for a background security check. We are now learning that these commonsense privacy protection techniques may be of dubious utility because governments, data brokers, and others have already amassed huge amounts of information about us. At the other end of the spectrum, some people are sitting ducks for identity theft, posting tagged facial photos and giving up their names, addresses, email, and other personal data in return for paltry rewards like a trade magazine subscription or a store loyalty card.

I hope that
Technocreep
has alerted you to the profound and fast-moving technological developments that are affecting your life today and will shape it in the future. This chapter is intended to give you a basic toolkit to carry out your personal action plan to deal with Technocreepiness.

Please think of this chapter as the starter toolbox that you would give someone moving into a first home. Those pliers and hammers and wrenches may help hang a picture, and even go a long way towards preventing serious household damage from a leaky toilet.

However, a set of hand tools probably will not solve major maintenance problems, just as these tips will not make you immune to serious efforts to attack your privacy by governments and corporations. But you will be much better off than your neighbor who has nothing.

One difference between home repair and protecting your digital life is the rate at which new tools are required. The only hand tool I've bought in the last five years is a Torx screwdriver to deal with those tamper-resistant screws that keep popping up on things I'd like to open. If you let your digital toolkit sit idle for five years, it would be laughably out of date, as new threats emerge, and new countermeasures are developed. This information in this chapter will therefore be updated as appropriate at
www.technocreep.com
.

Let's get started!

Know Thine Enemy.

The first step in formulating an intelligent response to growing technocreepiness is to understand who is after your information and why they want it. As discussed earlier in this book, the answer turns out to be a dizzying array of governments, corporations, even non-profit organizations and snoopy individuals. They get your information directly from you, from your activities in the online and physical worlds, from each other, and from data brokers.

The revelations of Edward Snowden, William Binney, and the journalists who reported on them showed how governments are actively collecting information about billons of people and actually using it on a day-to-day basis.
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We have even learned that the National Security Agency is using radio waves to spy on computers that are not even connected to the Internet.
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The examples in
Technocreep
have, I hope, convinced you that private companies can be just as curious about you as government agencies, and just as effective in their snooping, largely because they have enlisted you as their unwitting ally.

The Internet has also put tremendous power into the hands of private citizens. Your nosy neighbor might learn a great deal about you by researching you online, flying a tech-laden drone near your home, or even just gazing at you with Google Glass.

Because the stakes are so high, we are locked in a never-ending battle between increasingly sophisticated tracking techniques and clever countermeasures. Companies started to leave “cookies” on your computer to track your repeat visits. Consumers got smart and installed “cookie crunching” software. Companies then discovered “browser fingerprinting,” which takes advantage of the near-uniqueness of your computer, based on esoteric things like its clock speed and what software you have installed.

Here are some things you can do to find out who is watching you in the online world and how they are doing it:

Install software to help you track the trackers.

Ghostery works on most browsers and mobile devices. It will show a list of trackers on most webpages and allow you to selectively block them. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an excellent, and safe, add-on for the Firebox browser called Lightbeam that graphically visualizes the web of connections triggered by something as simple as visiting the website of the
New York Times
.

Block pop-ups, ads, and invisible websites.

Software to do this is widely and freely available. The most popular ones are currently Adblock Plus and Disconnect. As a delightful side effect, blocking online ads often speeds up your Internet browsing while decluttering your screen. If you are an advanced user, and using the Chrome browser, have a look at the HTTP Switchboard plug-in, which gives you even finer control over who can do what to your ­computer.

Go deep diving into places like your Facebook profile.

Often, information that has been collected about you is stored on a far-away server, so you have only indirect access. Facebook certainly operates that way, refusing to provide tools to answer simple questions like “who's stalking my profile” or “who has unfriended me.” By contrast, LinkedIn and
Academia.edu
tell you who has viewed your profile, though sometimes you need a paid account to get the full details.