The Blind Giant (17 page)

I said at the time, and I still feel now, that ‘creepy’ is not a line. It’s a no-man’s-land, and any time you approach it, you’re already in it. Google’s
StreetView program strikes many as well into creepy territory, for all that it’s useful and unthreatening when it’s a view of someone else’s street. In Germany, where the notion of privacy is more powerful than it is in the UK, the government has constrained Google to allow citizens to assert a
‘Verpixelungsrecht’ –
a right to blur images of their homes on the StreetView service. It’s a made-up word created to express a right that Germans feel they have – and which, in truth, many of us assume we have or wish we had too – to control the degree to which their personal spaces are casually snoopable. The extended hearths of Germany have the protection of their government.

Schmidt at least understands that not everyone wants every aspect of their lives to waterfall together online, although his solution to the problem is novel and perhaps a little tongue-in-cheek: in an interview with the
Wall Street Journal
in August 2010, he suggested that in time it may become customary for a person to take a new name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful errors on social media sites and make a new beginning. As a cultural what-if, it’s fascinating. As a genuine strategy, it’s hopeless. It only requires one person to connect the two identities for the whole thing to go up in smoke, and the idea that, for example, future employers would abide by the restriction on peeking is wishful at best. The information on a standard CV is more than enough to find out who you were, as well as who you want to be now. (I also can’t help but feel I’d want to change my name about once every ten years or so just to disavow some truly bad fashion choices.)

The sense of violated privacy is partly the sense of one sphere of life having entered another without permission; the inappropriate application of type B rules to behaviour that took place
within a space governed by type A rules. Or you could see it as the application of the working world to play. There’s a blurring of the lines – a common phenomenon in situations where the digital world is heavily involved in our lives. In reaching out to the world through social media, we have extended our grasp and made ourselves available to a great webwork of personalities and information. We have extended ourselves into informational space, and we are richer for it in many ways. But in reaching out, spreading our memories into digital formats and storing them outside our physical hearths, in servers accessible from around the world, we have also weakened the borders of our personal space, and as we extend into the world, so, inevitably, the world reaches out towards us – or even into us: at least, into the new spaces of the mind where we have located our external selves, and through them into the private spaces that we guard more jealously, but which, until recently, we did not need to fear might be exposed from without.

I say ‘we’ although there is a school of thought that says that the generations after my own feel less and less that this is the case. I’m not sure that’s true: I don’t think privacy is ever a primary issue in a political campaign, any more than a triumphal speech about voting reform and electoral methodology is likely to win you an election (alas). But the desire for privacy arrives when it is breached, not before; until the first time you feel intruded upon, or are denied a job because your Facebook page is too rowdy, how can you know you need it? Privacy is an issue when you want to be respectable, when you don’t wish to advertise your sex life, when you want to be alone and contemplative – things that happen somewhat later in life. I don’t imagine I cared much for privacy when I was nineteen. I do care about it now. So, yes, I believe that ‘we’, people in general, retain certain expectations about how our data will be handled, and who will be able to handle it, even if those expectations are unawakened until they are trespassed against.

More specifically: on some level, we feel that the information we create in response to the world, or which is created as a result of our passage through the world – digital or not – falls by natural right under our control. It is our choice who sees it, or whether it should be retained, sold or destroyed. The law feels much the same way, and much of the endless boilerplate text on social media sites is a contractual agreement in which we use the service in exchange for access to that information. Facebook and the like are not free. They are paid for in data about us, but our relationship with personal data is still in flux. We don’t yet understand the consequences of it, or even really have a feel for what it is. It’s become popular among some technologists recently to refer to laptops and data storage devices as ‘exobrains’ – an external place to keep information that is nonetheless part of the person in question.

In preparing this book, I’ve made copious use of a service called
Evernote. Evernote is a scrapbook that allows me to see something and make a note of it either by dictating a voice note, typing, photographing or clipping it from a web browser. It is, I suppose, a digital prosthetic that allows me to go far beyond the normal limits of the cognitive load of my working memory without dropping a stitch. When I need to go back to a topic, I type in a keyword and the service produces the items I wanted to consider, allowing me to weave them together with what I’m working on. I am literally using Evernote as an extension of my memory; my brain has no doubt included it in its metamap of my capabilities, considering Evernote a part of me. Here, however, US law at least begs to differ. An electronic device is not presently acknowledged to be a private thing, and is subject to search without cause or a warrant at ports of entry.

Increasingly, though, our information is part of our lives and our identities, even when detached from our persons. Amazon and assorted libraries have historically resisted requests from law enforcement to know what people are reading. Google has
fought demands for access to search histories. Twitter has gone to court to avoid handing over user data. Information about us and created by us, we feel on an instinctual level, still belongs to us and in some way is still part of us after we have moved on. Our digital footprints are not (should not be) public unless we say so. And on the face of it, at least, digital corporations agree and understand. In part, no doubt, for the historical reasons we’ve already talked about, many of the founders of these companies are averse to government scrutiny. The general tenor of hacker culture is anti-government. But not always anti-corporate, or, at least, not against the use of information gleaned from customers to make very large amounts of money. (It also has to be acknowledged, as Misha Glenny points out in
Dark Market
, that a certain amount of leeway exists in the relationship between large digital corporations and the US government; the US considers Google a strategic asset. Google’s Trust and Safety Manager is a former agent of the US Secret Service. This is not to suggest that Google would ever compromise its legal responsibilities to its customers, or that employees of the company would supply data to the government for which they should have to obtain court orders. Rather, it is to observe that while Google’s public posture is of rakish defiance of authority – a posture that perhaps looks a bit odd now that the company is a global titan – it seems not implausible that where necessary and permissible, Google tries to be a helpful corporate citizen of the nation where it was born.)

The practical reasons for our desire to sequester information are obvious, if not always entirely honourable.
Eric Schmidt again, back in 2009, told CNBC: ‘If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.’ Well, true; it’s probably a lot easier to get caught out having an affair now than it ever has been. On the other hand, Schmidt’s posture is massively entitled, the response of a wealthy white male in one of the most protected nations on earth. A moment’s reflection shows why he’s wrong: it’s not
impossible, for example, to find shelters for battered women by reverse engineering data. There are many things people do that are legal, even admirable, that require a fog of, if not deception, at least uncertainty to take place without negative repercussions. Face recognition software now being built in to social networking sites has the potential to expose all manner of secrets, from Romeo and Juliet-style relationships to undercover police operations, unless individuals are allowed control over their data. And the appetite for Internet spaces that are not premised on the exploitation of vast amounts of personal data exists: the start-up network
Diaspora, constructed in response to a statement by Free Software guru
Eben Moglen in which he described conventional social networks as ‘spying for free’,
¹
received $200,000 in funding through
Kickstarter (an initiative that allows companies to seek funding directly from the public) and is gathering momentum even as this book is being written.

A desire for privacy does not imply shameful secrets; Moglen argues, again and again, that without anonymity in discourse, free speech is impossible, and hence also democracy. The right to speak the truth to power does not shield the speaker from the consequences of so doing; only comparable power or anonymity can do that. More practical and more disturbing, there is a much used quotation regarding the value of privacy in troubled times – and when are times anything else? – that is attributed to Cardinal Richelieu in the seventeenth century, though it may actually have come from one of his agents: ‘If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.’

Privacy is a protection from the unreasonable use of state and corporate power. But that is, in a sense, a secondary thing. In the first instance, privacy is the statement in words of a simple understanding, which belongs to the instinctive world rather than the formal one, that some things are the province of those who experience them and not naturally open to the scrutiny of others:
courtship and love, with their emotional nakedness; the simple moments of family life; the appalling rawness of grief. That the state and other systems are precluded from snooping on these things is important – it is a strong barrier between the formal world and the hearth, extended or not – but at root privacy is a simple understanding: not everything belongs to everyone.

One of the areas bringing strife to digital politics is the battle over intellectual property, or IP. It was my point of entry into the issues of digitization, and one of the first things I realized was that measures to ‘enforce’ IP online almost instantly cease to be about IP and become a discussion of total online surveillance. I think there’s an absolute error of priorities there: I am not willing to solve the problem of people not wanting to pay for work I’ve done by demanding an Orwellian eyeball peering through every keyhole. It’s a ridiculous misunderstanding of what society is for and what privacy and – though it’s unfashionable to talk about it in the UK – freedom are worth. Without the former, you cannot have the latter.

I also feel that there’s a forlorn sort of desperation about the hardline
copyright fight. I mentioned Misha Glenny’s
Dark Market
earlier; the book deals with a structure of non-public websites and Internet venues that trade in illegal goods and services – some of them frankly vile. The ‘dark web’ is hard for law enforcement to penetrate, sophisticated and elusive. The commodities bought and sold through it are the stuff of serious criminal enterprise, espionage, terrorism and ghastliness. It remains active. Does it genuinely seem likely that we will be able to crack down on copyright violation when we have been unable to prevent the ongoing commission and facilitation of far more serious crimes online? Will we, in the name of profit and Mickey Mouse, throw away more privacy and accept more surveillance and intrusion than we have accepted in the search for
stolen nuclear materiel? It seems highly unlikely; and if we did, I would not count it much of a victory.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that privacy and intellectual property are major battlegrounds in the shaping of our digital environment, but I do find it odd that so many privacy campaigners are also uncomfortable with the idea of IP – even though I absolutely see how they arrive at that position, given the draconian measures lawmakers are being asked to adopt by angry content industries. I also find it bizarre that the IP lobby is willing to trash the idea of a right to privacy and even call for massive intrusion. To me, the issues are closely related. Privacy and IP share to my eye a common conceptual basis, and the problems that they both face in the age of digital reproduction are problems in common.

Intellectual property is the idea that information belongs in some way to the person who formulates it. IP law is drafted somewhat differently in different countries, and it should be acknowledged that while I think the principle is sound, the implementation and use are in some cases objectionable, aggressive and counterproductive. Conceptually, however, I believe it’s hugely important.