The googlization of ever.., p.12
The Googlization of Everything, page 12
Broad assumptions about the apparent indifference to privacy share a basic misunderstanding of the issue. Too often we assume that a concern with privacy merely represents a desire to withhold information about personal conduct, such as sexual activity or drug use. But privacy is not just about personal choices, or some group of traits or behaviors we call “private” things. Nor are privacy concerns the same for every context in which we live and move. Privacy is an unfortunate term, because it carries no sense of its own customizability and contingency. When we complain about infringements of privacy, what we really demand is some measure of control over our reputations. Who should have the power to collect, cross-reference, publicize, or share information about us? If I choose to declare my romantic status or sexual orientation on Facebook, I may still consider that I am preserving my privacy because I assume I am managing the release of that information in a context I think I understand. Privacy refers to the terms of control over information, not the nature of the information we share.16
Through a combination of weak policies, poor public discussions, and some remarkable inventions, we cede more and more control over our reputations every day. And it’s clear that people are being harmed by the actions that follow from widespread behavioral profiling, whether it’s done by the Transportation Security Agency through its “no-fly list” or Capital One Bank through its no-escape, high-fee credit cards for those with poor credit ratings.
Jay Gatsby could not exist today. The digital ghost of Jay Gatz would follow him everywhere. There are no second acts, or second chances, in the digital age. Rehabilitation demands substantial autonomy and control over one’s record. As long as our past indiscretions can be easily Googled by potential employers or U.S. security agents, our social, intellectual, and actual mobility is limited.17
We learn early on that there are public matters and private matters, and that we manage information differently inside our homes and outside them. Yet that distinction fails to capture the true complexity of the privacy tangle. Because it’s so hard to define and describe what we mean by privacy and because it so often seems futile to resist mass surveillance, we need better terms, models, metaphors, and strategies for controlling our personal information. Here’s one way to begin to think more effectively about the issue.
We each have at least five major “privacy interfaces,” or domains, through which we negotiate what is known about us.18 Each of these interfaces offers varying levels of control and surveillance.
The first privacy interface is what I call “person to peer.” Early on, we develop the skills necessary to manage what our friends and families know of our predilections, preferences, and histories. A boy growing up gay in a homophobic family learns to exert control over others’ knowledge of his sexual orientation. A teenager smoking marijuana in her bedroom learns to hide the evidence. If we cheat on our partners, we practice lying. These are all privacy strategies for the most personal spheres.
The second interface is one I call “person to power.” There is always some information we wish to keep from our teachers, parents, employers, or prison guards because it could be used to manipulate us or expose us to harsh punishment. The common teenage call “Stay out of my room!” exemplifies the frustration of learning to manage this essential interface. Later in life, an employee may find it prudent to conceal a serious medical condition from her employer to prevent being dismissed to protect the company’s insurance costs.
The third privacy interface is “person to firm.” In this interface, we decide whether we wish to answer the checkout person at Babies “R” Us when she asks us (almost always at a moment when we are feeling weak and frustrated) for a home phone number. We gladly accept what we think are free services, such as discount cards at supermarkets and bookstores, that actually operate as record-keeping account tokens. The clerk at the store almost never explains this other side of the bargain.
The fourth interface is the most important because the consequences of error and abuse are so high: “person to state.” Through the census, tax forms, drivers’ license records, and myriad other bureaucratic functions, the state records traces of our movements and activities. The mysterious and problem-riddled “no-fly list” that bars people from boarding commercial flights in the United States for unaccountable reasons is the best example. Because the state has a monopoly on legitimate violence, imprisonment, and deportation, the cost of being falsely caught in a dragnet warrants concern, no matter how unlikely it seems.
The fifth privacy interface is poorly understood and has only recently gained notice, although Nathaniel Hawthorne explained it well in The Scarlet Letter. It’s what I call “person to public.” At this interface, which is now located largely online, people have found their lives exposed, their names and faces ridiculed, and their well-being harmed immeasurably by the rapid proliferation of images, the asocial nature of much ostensibly “social” Web behavior, and the permanence of the digital record. Whereas in our real social lives we have learned to manage our reputations, the online environments in which we work and play have broken down the barriers that separate the different social contexts in which we move. On Facebook, MySpace, or YouTube, a coworker may be an online friend, fan, or critic. A supervisor could be a stalker. A parent could be a lurker. A prospective lover could use the same online dating service as a former lover. In real life, we may be able to keep relationships separate, to switch masks and manage what people know (or think they know) about us. But most online environments are intentionally engineered to serve our professional, educational, and personal desires simultaneously. These contexts or interfaces blend, and legal distinctions between public and private no longer hold up.19 We are just beginning to figure out how to manage our reputations online, but as long as the companies that host these environments benefit directly from the confusion, the task will not be easy.
In The Future of Reputation, the law professor Daniel Solove relates the sad story of the “Star Wars Kid.” In November 2002, a Canadian teenager used a school camera to record himself acting like a character from Star Wars, wielding a golf-ball retriever as a light saber. Some months later, other students at his school discovered the recording and posted it on a file-sharing network. Within days, the image of a geeky teen playing at Star Wars became the hit of the Internet. Thousands—perhaps millions—downloaded the video. Soon, many downloaders used their computers to enhance the video, adding costumes, special effects, and even opponents for the young man to slay. Hundreds of versions still haunt the Web. Many Web sites hosted nasty comments about the boy’s weight and appearance. Soon his name and high school became public knowledge. By the time YouTube debuted in 2005, the “Star Wars Kid” was a miserable and unwilling star of user-generated culture. He had to quit school. The real-world harassment drove his family to move to a new town. The very nature of digital images, the Internet, and Google made it impossible for the young man to erase the record of one afternoon of harmless fantasy. But it was not the technology that was at fault, Solove reminds us. It was our willingness to ridicule others publicly and our ease at appealing to free-speech principles to justify the spreading of everything everywhere, exposing and hurting the innocent along the way.20
No one made any money from this or the other events that Solove describes, and the state is neutral toward such incidents, so we can’t blame market forces or security overreactions. But our appetite for public humiliation of others (undeserved or otherwise) should trouble us deeply. Like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, any one of us may be unable to escape the traces of our mistakes. We are no longer in control of our public personas, because so many of our fellow citizens carry with them instruments of surveillance and exposure such as cameras and video recorders. An advocate of Internet creativity and its potential to contribute to democratic culture, Solove treads lightly around any idea that might stifle creative experimentation. But even those of us who celebrate this cultural “mashup” moment would be delinquent if we ignored the real harms that Solove exposes.
The sociologist James Rule, in Privacy in Peril, emphasizes one point that is either muted in or absent from most other discussions about privacy and surveillance: data collected by one institution is easily transferred, mined, used, and abused by others. Companies such as Choice-Point buy our supermarket and bookstore shopping records and sell them to direct-mail marketers, political parties, and even the federal government. These data-mining companies also collect state records such as voter registration forms, deeds, car titles, and liens in order to sell consumer profiles to direct-marketing firms. As a result of this cross-referencing of so many data points, ChoicePoint knows me better than my parents do—which explains why the catalogs that arrive at my home better reflect my tastes than the ties my father gives me each birthday. Each data point, each consumer choice, says something about you. If you purchase several prepaid cell phones and a whole lot of hummus, you might be profiled as a potential jihadist. If you use your American Express Platinum card to buy a latte from Starbucks the same day that you purchase a new biography of Alexander Hamilton from Barnes and Noble in an affluent Atlanta ZIP code, you might be identified as a potential donor to a Republican election campaign.21
The privacy laws of the 1970s, for which Rule can claim some credit after his 1974 book Private Lives and Public Surveillance, sought to guarantee some measure of transparency in state data retention. Individuals should be entitled to know what the federal government knew about them and thus be able to correct errors. And there were to be strong limits on how government agencies shared such data.22 As Rule explains in Privacy in Peril, such commonsense guidelines were eroded almost as soon as they became law. And in recent years, following pressure from the great enemy of public transparency and accountability, former vice president Dick Cheney, they have been pushed off the public agenda altogether. It’s as if Watergate, the Church Committee report (which in 1975 exposed massive government surveillance of U.S. citizens and other illegal abuses of power by the CIA), and the revelations of FBI infiltration of antiwar protest groups never happened.23
Mass surveillance has been a fact of life since the eighteenth century. There is nothing new about the bureaucratic imperative to record and manipulate data on citizens and consumers. Digital tools just make it easier to collect, merge, and sell databases. Every incentive in a market economy pushes firms to collect more and better data on us. Every incentive in a state bureaucracy encourages massive surveillance. Small changes, such as the adoption of better privacy policies by companies like Google and Amazon, are not going to make much difference in the long run. So the only remedy is widespread political action in the public interest, much as we had in the 1970s. Passivity in the face of these threats to dignity and personal security will only invite the deployment of more unaccountable technologies of surveillance. The challenge is too large and the risks too great.
“STREET VIEW” AND THE UNIVERSALIZATION OF SURVEILLANCE
Although there is indeed nothing new about the incentives for the state and businesses to keep tabs on private individuals, Google, with its Street View service in Google Maps, now enables individuals to undertake forms of surveillance of each other that have never been possible before. Our first reactions to seeing other people’s streets and neighborhoods on our screens are hyperbolic. Once the service has been in place for a while, however, it generates broad interest and some utility. It also causes much anxiety without causing demonstrable harm. Only in a handful of places has Google been urged or forced to alter Street View significantly.
Google Street View allows users of Google Maps to take a 360-degree view, at ground level, of streets and intersections in many cities in (as of 2009) the Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, in addition to the United States and the United Kingdom. Google captures these images by sending automobiles known as Googlemobiles (Vauxhall Astras in the United Kingdom; Chevrolet Cobalts in the United States; Toyota Priuses in Japan), with special cameras mounted on their roofs, to drive along every street in a city.24 Launched first in May 2007 in New York, San Francisco, and a handful of other large U.S. cities, Google Street View now covers thousands of small towns across the United States—even Charlottesville, Virginia (population 50,000). At first, American users flocked to the service to check for a record of their own lives, and perhaps to discover embarrassing or revealing aspects that Google might disclose. Many commentators declared the service to be too invasive for comfort.25
Generally, Google introduces a service in a standard way in all locations. If it generates attention or complaints, Google might tailor some policies for a specific locality. But the defaults Google sets for itself are consistent, if not constant. Responding to the initial criticisms of Street View, Google defended the service by saying—as it always does—that if anyone reported an image to be troubling, embarrassing, or revealing of personal information such as faces or vehicle license plates, Google would be happy to remove or smudge the image. But, as usual, the defaults were set for maximum exposure.
Critical suspicion of Google Street View faded after a few weeks. Over time, as no horror stories emerged, American Google users became accustomed to the new function and started coming up with creative ways to employ it. Google accurately gauged the sensibilities toward privacy and publicity of users in the United States, where practicality has a way of sweeping away any number of nebulous concerns.
As I studied the reaction in the spring of 2009, I wondered to what interesting uses my fellow Americans had put Google Street View in the two years since its launch. I solicited some input via Twitter, Facebook, and my blog. Overwhelmingly, my respondents (mostly technologically adept and highly educated) reported using Street View to scout out potential homes. Some used it to assess the prospects for parking in a busy area. Others wrote that they often remembered where a restaurant was, but could not remember its name or precise address, so they used Street View to locate it and recommend it to friends.26
A few of my responders had particularly interesting applications for Street View. David de la Peña, an architect based in Davis, California, uses Street View daily in his work:
[Google Street View] is a very useful tool that I use regularly on community design and streetscape projects. It saves me from the drudgery of taking hundreds of photographs of a site, and the user interface is more intuitive than flipping through, say, 100 photographs of a street. For community design projects, it allows designers to see a neighborhood scene more or less from eye-level perspective. When we see a neighborhood from this experiential level, rather than from an aerial photograph, we have a better shot at creating more livable environments. The eye-level views also allow us to verify elements of a streetscape that just aren’t apparent from a plan or an aerial photo, such as architectural character, yard and porch layouts, and tree types. For streetscape projects, the eye-level views give a very realistic view of a street’s character, which are comprised of building facades; types and varieties of street trees; locations of street lights and power poles; and arrangements of drive lanes, bicycle lanes, parking and sidewalks.
I started using it as soon as it was available. I immediately saw it as a useful tool to be added to my toolbox. Before [Google Street View], we relied primarily upon aerial photographs, MS Live 3D aerials, and photos we would take ourselves. Of course, none of these replaces on-the-ground research. I have been using [Google Street View], for example, on a project near Sacramento that is located 30 minutes from my office. We are trying to locate a new community center and park within a low-income neighborhood on foreclosed fourplexes that the city owns. GSV gave me a better sense than any other visual tool about the feel of each of the potential sites. Today I visited the sites to confirm our intuitions and to take more photographs. While walking the neighborhood, I was approached by eight different neighbors asking what I was doing. People naturally get suspicious when you’re taking pictures of their homes, but if you’re open to talking with them, other doors will open. I met a few single mothers who had great suggestions for locating a tot lot, and an on-site building manager who had suggestions for how the city deals with code compliance. These chance encounters gave me more information than any visual tool could, and more important, they helped me to establish as sense of trust.27
Cory Doctorow, an author, blogger, and activist, told me that he had used Google Street View to describe in detail a scene in San Francisco when he was writing his successful young-adult novel Little Brother. Here is the scene from his novel: “I picked up the WiFi signal with my phone’s wifinder about three blocks up O’Farrell, just before Hyde Street, in front of a dodgy ‘Asian Massage Parlor’ with a red blinking CLOSED sign in the window. The network’s name was HarajukuFM, so we knew we had the right spot.”28
Doctorow wrote to me that he had written much of the novel while living in Los Angeles, but had done a lot of globe-trotting during that time, as well. “I think I was writing from Heathrow that day, or possibly Croatia. I know O’Farrell [Street] pretty well, but it had been a few years. I zoomed up and down the street with [Google Street View] for a few seconds until I had refreshed my memory, then wrote.”29
One objection to Street View in the United States came from Aaron and Christine Boring, a couple living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Concerned that Street View included clear images of their driveway and house, which was sited far back from the street, the couple sued Google in April 2008 seeking $25,000 in damages and alleging Google had in effect trespassed on their property through the power of its lenses. The judge in the case dismissed their claims in February 2009 because the couple had not taken the simple step of requesting that Google remove the offending images. In other words, as far as the court was concerned, as soon as the Borings had discovered the images of their property, they could have acted in a low-cost way to alleviate the conflict. However, that decision did not take account of how long the images had been public or how many people might have seen them.30
