The end of privacy | The Health Culture

Did you know there’s a Gmail feature – Mail Goggles – that will prompt you to solve simple math problems before you hit send? This “soft paternalism” keeps you from doing something you’d regret later. By default, it’s only active late at night on weekends, “when you’re most likely to need it.” You can adjust the settings, though.

Here’s a long article (at NYT) — by a law professor — that discusses the dangers of oversharing and the “behavioral economics of privacy” — the trade-offs we make, consciously or unconsciously, when we decide to reveal or conceal information. (emphasis added)

[A] challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever. …

[T]here was the 16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, “I’m so totally bored!!”; there was the 66-year-old Canadian psychotherapist who tried to enter the United States but was turned away at the border — and barred permanently from visiting the country — after a border guard’s Internet search found that the therapist had written an article in a philosophy journal describing his experiments 30 years ago with L.S.D. …

The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts.

A collective identity crisis

People change. Not just from youthful indiscretion to mature adult, but – ideally – people continue to discover and pursue new interests throughout a lifetime. (emphasis added)

“[By] erasing external memories [photos, letters], our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.” In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast, … a society in which everything is recorded “will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.” …

It’s often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you. All this has created something of a collective identity crisis.

A humane society values privacy

The article briefly mentions how identity – our sense of self – has changed over historical time. Identity used to be defined by the social circumstances of our birth – who our parents were, our social class. A sense of individuality developed only in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. What we now think of as identity became more fluid, and we came to believe it was something we could control. (For an example of identity fluidity, see this article on the influence of Lady Gaga.)

[T]he Web was supposed to be the second flowering of the open frontier, and the ability to segment our identities with an endless supply of pseudonyms, avatars and categories of friendship was supposed to let people present different sides of their personalities in different contexts. What seemed within our grasp was a power that only Proteus possessed: namely, perfect control over our shifting identities.

But the hope that we could carefully control how others view us in different contexts has proved to be another myth. As social-networking sites expanded, it was no longer quite so easy to have segmented identities: now that so many people use a single platform to post constant status updates and photos about their private and public activities, the idea of a home self, a work self, a family self and a high-school-friends self has become increasingly untenable. In fact, the attempt to maintain different selves often arouses suspicion. Moreover, far from giving us a new sense of control over the face we present to the world, the Internet is shackling us to everything that we have ever said, or that anyone has said about us, making the possibility of digital self-reinvention seem like an ideal from a distant era.

Some argue that social networking, and the web in general, encourages us to merge our identities – to no longer have separate selves for home, office, leisure, and friends. As the author points out, however, “a humane society values privacy, because it allows people to cultivate different aspects of their personalities in different contexts.”

We don’t feel and act the same in all situations. Learning to recognize the people and circumstances that make us feel good or bad about who we are is how we create the life we want.

Update 10/13/10:
‘Scrapers’ Dig Deep for Data on Web (The Wall Street Journal)

Good story on the business of collecting everything that’s available on the Internet, including things you’d like to keep private, and selling it to interested parties.

At 1 a.m. on May 7, the website PatientsLikeMe.com noticed suspicious activity on its “Mood” discussion board. There, people exchange highly personal stories about their emotional disorders, ranging from bipolar disease to a desire to cut themselves.

It was a break-in. A new member of the site, using sophisticated software, was “scraping,” or copying, every single message off PatientsLikeMe’s private online forums.

PatientsLikeMe managed to block and identify the intruder: Nielsen Co., the privately held New York media-research firm. Nielsen monitors online “buzz” for clients, including major drug makers, which buy data gleaned from the Web to get insight from consumers about their products, Nielsen says. …

The market for personal data about Internet users is booming, and in the vanguard is the practice of “scraping.” Firms offer to harvest online conversations and collect personal details from social-networking sites, résumé sites and online forums where people might discuss their lives. …

Some companies collect personal information for detailed background reports on individuals, such as email addresses, cell numbers, photographs and posts on social-network sites. Others offer what are known as listening services, which monitor in real time hundreds or thousands of news sources, blogs and websites to see what people are saying about specific products or topics. …

Employers, too, are trying to figure out how to use such data to screen job candidates. It’s tricky: Employers legally can’t discriminate based on gender, race and other factors they may glean from social-media profiles.

Update 10/14/10:
Gov’t Pencil Pushers Cyber Spy on Matt Damon and Other Celebs (Mother Jones)

Low-level employees, with access to private information stored electronically, can’t resist indulging their curiosity. Article doesn’t mention how this also happens to celebrity patients, e.g., following the death of Michael Jackson.

[P]erhaps it’s no surprise that government employees can’t fight the urge to pry into the private lives of high-profile figures using something they do have: access to vast digital repositories of sensitive personal information.

No amount of specialized training and threats of criminal prosecution seem capable of slowing the stories that emerge periodically and predictably of another government worker getting into trouble for drawing up private records not just on Hollywood actors, rock stars, and political candidates, but everyday people, too. …

The Department of Homeland Security, with its multitude of databases, even came up with a mascot to teach bureaucrats the need for responsibly handling personal information, known as “Privacy Man.” He dons a superhero mask and costume. (We can’t make this stuff up, folks. The poster above was obtained from DHS.) …

Two highway patrolmen were reprimanded for backgrounding their families and ex-spouses, a county commissioner reportedly looked up info on fellow politicians and municipal officials, and a police lieutenant was fired amid accusations that he conducted wrongful checks on nearly 200 people, many of whom were women.

Resources:

Image source: SFGate

Jeffrey Rosen, The Web Means the End of Forgetting, The New York Times, July 21, 2010