Brian Conley's News & Notes

With the release of Buzz, and the much hyped privacy disaster coming so soon after rumors that Google was talking with the NSA< one has to ask whether or not Google really is trying to kill privacy.

An unfortunate thing about privacy, in the online space, is that privacy there is directly connected with access to anonymity. There is essentially no anonymity online, without taking active measures yourself to ensure anonymity. As there is no anonymity, there is little or no true privacy.

It’s probably important to understand why there is no anonymity. A brief explanation, when you are surfing the web you have a unique IP address, whether it is one address distributed to many sub addresses connected to a home or office router, or your computer connected directly. This IP address is noticed by the website you arrive at, which can now also gather the url you arrived from and the url you depart to. Utilizing “cookies” which are small pieces of text your web browser stores locally, websites can gather more information about you and your browsing habits. When you connect these with personally identifiable data like Amazon.com or Facebook, or even iGoogle accounts, you start to see how your anonymity dissipates.

It is precisely because of the need to move from more anonymous data to less anonymous data that companies like Facebook are doing so well, and companies like Google are exploring how to get into the social media game. Unfortunately for Google, they underestimated the importance of “privacy in context.”

I’m not sure I agree with Helen Nissbaum’s thesis in overall, but I do agree with this:

The nuts-and-bolts of my theory says that privacy depends on the social context of information being shared and what’s appropriate for those contexts.

What Google forgot is that, even though any n00b privacy activist will tell you that email is not private without encryption, people feel anonymous and feel private with their email. Just as an individual might be empowered by wearing a mask, that same individual can be empowered by email to engage in activities they wouldn’t otherwise.

The question of anonymity online, full anonymity, is rarely considered by many outside of threatened human rights activists and privacyphiles. The feeling of anonymity or privacy however is taken for granted.

When first Facebook, and then Google Buzz suddenly began broadcasting information about users to the world, in Facebook’s case to everyone and in Google’s case “following” everyone you email or chat with regularly based on some unknown algorithm known only to them, these users came face to face with the latter-day Panopticon.

Some readers may think I’m at risk of drifting into histrionics here about the rise of a security state or the NSA tracking your computers location via internet latency measurements, or the FBI wanting access to your browser history. This is not what I am attempting to suggest. I see the Google Buzz accident as an event that demonstrates the desire of Google to eliminate the idea of privacy, so that we become not just happy existing in a digital panopticon, but so that we recognize its there, and then forget.

Under such a lens it makes sense that Google would ask the NSA for help, or that they would so greatly underestimate the potential backlash from Google Buzz.

According to NYT, Sergey Brin of Google said that by offering social communications, Buzz would help bridge the gap between work and leisure.

In the same article, something perhaps more blatantly reminiscent of a Panopticon comes from Facebook:

“We don’t aspire to be just a Web site where people connect and share with friends,” said Ethan Beard, director of the Facebook developer network and a former Google executive. “We want to be the underlying technology people use to connect with friends wherever they are on the Web.”

Google wants to kill anonymity. So does Facebook. Their business models depend on it. They want to kill anonymity more than privacy, but if they continue to kill privacy context, people will continue to be up in arms.

Unfortunately, you should be more worried about access to anonymity and the increasing interconnection of your everyday actions with a searchable, aggregatable, quantifiable database that is the Internet.

Jeremy Bentham could perhaps not have imagined a world where closed circuit cameras turned “public space” into its own panopticon, where shoppers and citizens alike could never know who was watching them, monitoring their movements, keeping an eye whether they were acting for good or ill. Such power could surely only be reserved for an omniscient/omnipresent being the threat of whose observations, lets be honest, were the actual precursor to the Panopticon.

The increase in sociality some have begun talking about also tends toward the potential for increasing the reach and capabilities of the State. It’s yet another reason that we should continue to push for access to anonymity online. If privacy is effectively killed, and your every online habit can be broadcast to an infinite number of “guards” sitting at their own little “observation posts” ie web browsers, it won’t be long until most of us begin to ignore the internet Panopticon as much as we do the one at Walmart, our office job, or the local shopping mall.

That’s not a future I’m anxious to see. What are your thoughts? Please comment!