Surveillance society

We prioritize shopping and convenience. But if privacy becomes enough of a commodity in the Internet age, we might actually think about the principles that are at stake.

By Kathleen Hughes

Privacy” makes me think about those diaries that used to come with locks; my sister had one under all the other papers in her desk. You could jigger them with a safety pin, paper clip, or nail file — anything, actually. But the concept was nice. Or I think of how much I hated going door-to-door selling popcorn, cheese, and chocolate to strangers for my elementary school. I think of trying on bathing suits at a skateboard shop while in high school, and the rumor that the guys who owned the shop had planted cameras in the dressing rooms. In other words, privacy was literal and seemed tangible.

Privacy now means that whole companies of strangers know that I, myself, am not apt to buy popcorn, although perhaps cheese and chocolate; they know if they really want to get me, offer the new Patty Griffin CD or a good deal on Adidas Poseidon running shoes, and they’ll peg my size. What about the places where privacy is still rather literal, such as the doctor’s office or pharmacy? It wouldn’t be unprecedented if a nonprofit cancer organization started sending solicitations based on prescriptions or records. Or how about this: when was the last time you looked up some disease or ailment in an online medical encyclopedia, maybe for your own personal use or for, say, a newspaper article? Take leprosy, for example. Unseen Web bugs, cookies, and click-stream monitoring all report that you’ve been there, and they don’t ask why.

Even if you don’t use the Internet and thus aren’t subject to the surveillance technology that helps e-merchants to sell things, a 1993 federal law regulating credit bureaus allows the sale, to anyone, of your name, age, address, phone number, Social Security number, and your mother’s maiden name. These same laws permit information brokers, with slogans like “No more secrets!” to sell anyone the details of your bank account, unlisted phone number, place of employment, and more. The headline-making consequences of this — harassment, stalking, murder — are rare enough that politics and law have yet to catch up with localized outrages.

The far more common result of compromised information, both on the Internet and off, is identity theft, worth about $745 million nationwide in 1997, according to the Secret Service, and credit card fraud. As a result, “privacy” itself is now a hot e-commerce product on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. Consider the competition among encryption technologies: American Express’s disposable credit cards, called Private Payments, and iPrivacy, the transaction-privatizing software start-up staffed by scientists, a venture capitalist, and former Citibank credit card managers.

It’s clear that consumers want safe, private on-line credit card transactions. And it’s clear, given the growing prominence of anonymous e-mail and Web surfing tools that we’re beginning to appreciate the porousness of the Internet. The polls, by Harris, Scripps-Howard, and the Pew Internet and Family Life Project, argue that Americans care more about privacy now than ever before. The topic has become so prevalent in the zeitgeist that the main quest in a fluffy movie like Charlie’s Angels is to protect the identity of Charlie, that very secretive man somewhere beyond the speakerphone, and to save “privacy as we know it.”

But then there’s the presence of Oprah, The Real World, The Truman Show, and their numerous imitators, all evidencing Americans’ congenital nosiness and obsession with personal disclosure. Add to this Monicagate, the monitoring of public places by surveillance cameras, and the tenuousness of a woman’s right to chose — which is based on a constitutional right to privacy — and one wonders if Americans are truly concerned about privacy, in principle, as a civil right. Or is it just our credit cards and bank accounts?

Civil libertarians and privacy advocates are pushing for the former. “We are gradually entering a surveillance society where our innermost thoughts, medical, and financial data are subject to collection and publication and misuse,” says Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Providence, Rhode Island-based lawyer Robert Ellis Smith, dubbed “the Ralph Nader of privacy,” has plenty to write about these days in his portentous, 26-year-old monthly newsletter on privacy issues, Privacy Journal, which, in only a decade’s time has seen the number of peer publications triple, from two to six. In Denver, Stephen Keating, executive director of the Privacy Foundation, which monitors privacy-impacting technology, compares the emerging privacy movement to the infancy of environmentalism in the ’60s, when consciousness about industrial contamination and gas-guzzling, polluting cars was raised by grassroots organizers before becoming a wider concern.

If the erosion of privacy threatens people’s sense of wellness and civil rights in the same way as toxic waste, cars without catalytic converters, and smokestacks without scrubbers, Americans may have to reconsider the way we shop, communicate, and do business. At stake, arguably, is not just our privacy, but the way we understand ourselves, one by one, and in total, as a culture.

The current state of privacy in America results from our obsession with convenience, curiosity, and vanity, each of which we choose over privacy.

Aggressive, privacy-impacting marketing and technology arise in part because we tolerate and even enjoy it. In a contemporary twist on the charming old Main Street grocer who thoroughly knew customers’ weekly requirement for provisions, as well as the names, ages, and accomplishments of their children, we are flattered by the personal care and addicted to the convenience spawned by targeted marketing, such as Amazon.com’s personal recommendation list, even if these are enabled by cookies and click-stream monitoring. Says Amazon’s vice president of entertainment, Jennifer Cast, “We continue to focus a lot of development time and effort on improving recommendations and other personalized features, because customers like, value, and use them.”

Sally Sutton, executive director of the Maine Civil Liberties Union, feels consumers need to be given a choice whether to give up information or not. “Of course companies say, ‘Well you don’t have to shop here.’ But that is not necessarily a real choice. Imagine you have a choice between three insurance companies and they all require you to release private information.”

Sutton hopes that businesses themselves will provide more choice as a “matter of good business practice . . . What we are hoping is that businesses will wake up and respect the fact that privacy is an issue that most people feel strongly about. Then people will be able to choose to buy from companies that respect their privacy.”

However, according to Bernie Rogan, spokesman for Shaw’s supermarkets, consumers have strongly indicated that they are willing to disclose their name and address in exchange for a card the store began offering October 15 that rewards them with discounts at Shaw’s and retail partners. Though customers had the choice not to apply for a card, Roban says 86 percent of shoppers at Shaw’s across the northeast used their new Rewards Card in the past week. Further, many consumers have a choice not to shop at Shaw’s at all. Many live near other supermarkets. But Shaw’s has not experienced any drop in sales. In fact, in one store in Connecticut sales were up 15 percent last week. This despite competitor Shop N’ Save’s ad campaign that took direct aim at privacy issues related to Shaw’s Rewards Card.

But it’s not just the cost-savings and convenience provided at the supermarket. Convenience also ensures the presence in our lives of cordless phones, which are highly susceptible to transmission over other people’s phones, radios, CB’s, and similar devices. In New York City, a baby monitor inside an apartment will invariably pick up a cordless telephone conversation in a neighboring apartment, no matter how thick the brick walls. Convenience also prompts people to spy on friends and acquaintances with new tools like Evite, Web-bug-equipped electronic invitations that tell a host when guests open e-mail invitations. Despite the discomfort of being intrusive, some users can’t resist the technology. “It’s something I feel uncomfortable with as a consumer,” Jad Duwaik, a networking party organizer, recently told the New York Times. “But as an organizer it’s just too useful to give up.” Web-bug software is also available that can be used by people applying for jobs via e-mail, or anyone else, to know when their electronic messages are opened by a recipient.

In general, as Smith argues in his book, Ben Franklin’s Web Site (Privacy Journal, 2000), modern technology and the convenience and/or pleasures it provides have come at the cost of privacy. Consider, over the last century, the arrival of the instamatic camera, the telephone, the tape recorder, the moving picture, the computer database, and now, the Internet. What has driven these inventions and their invasive uses, apart from convenience? Curiosity, in part. “We seem to be enamored with the idea of privacy,” Smith writes, “but probably more enamored with the idea of learning more and more about our friends and neighbors — and about the celebrities among us.”

To the extent that we satisfy this curiosity in others, via Oprah, chat rooms, and tabloids, we don’t mind others’ curiosity about ourselves. In fact, says Joshua Gamson, a Yale University sociology professor, we crave such attention. “This is an extraordinarily ocular culture, and one that rewards the looked-at, so it ought not be surprising that lots of people are ready to be watched,” Gamson wrote in the American Prospect in November 1998. “Being looked at, being visible, being known about, is a currency.”

Another reason convenience, curiosity, and vanity come before privacy is because the average threat of compromised privacy is so diffuse. All of us who surf the Web are victims of the advertising and marketing technologies that quietly observe surfing and purchasing activity. The most common tool, a “cookie,” is a small text file that a Web site deposits on your computer as an identifier (of the computer) and a recorder of preferences and other data while you are on the site. The cookie, once imprinted, customizes subsequent site visits. Navigation and click-stream data are gathered by a third-party computer watching your computer online, following the sites and pages it visits, and tracking the time you spend at each place. These tools keep track of your computer as a number in cyberspace, which connect to an e-mail address. A relatively new technology, a “Web bug,” appears as a graphic on a Web page, or in an e-mail message, that is designed to monitor who’s reading the Web page or e-mail message — as with Evite. These bugs, often invisible, can be bought as software and used by anyone. Each of these technologies aim, primarily, to discern how best to market to you.

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