Is our quest for more security at the cost of our privacy?
By Zafar Anjum
16 Dec 2008
Recently, I read a story in The New York Times about a brothel in Prague. It is called the Big Sister (perhaps an allusion to the Orwellian Big Brother) which touts itself as the world’s biggest Internet brothel.
Big Sister marries the virtual with the real, leading to an unusual business model. Customers can have free sex at Big Sister. In return, they will allow the brothel to capture their exploits on film. The resulting porn is streamed live onto Big Sister’s website.
But the newspaper report was not about the innovativeness of Big Sister’s business model. Through the brothel’s example, the report highlighted how the ongoing global financial crisis was affecting the brothel’s business as the number of sex tourists coming to Prague had diminished.
The reason I cite this example is not because I want to talk about pornography or the economic crisis. My intention is to illustrate how people willfully submit their privacy (a human right) to profit-seekers.
In Big Sister’s case, the momentary carnal pleasure comes as freebie but the ultimate price that is extracted from the revellers is priceless—human privacy. Moments of compromised privacy is broadcast to those who find value in it on Sky Italia and Britain’s Television X, or sold as a DVD, like ‘World Cup Love Truck’.
What’s scary here? One’s privacy is gone for ever but it has not been taken at a gun point. One has willingly signed it off for a (Faustian?) bargain.
What’s the connection, you might ask. Replace sex with search, and you will get the point. But we will come to that a bit later.
Children of Men
Now take an example closer to home. Both SingTel and Starhub have mobile tracking and video camera services that allow parents to keep an eye on their children and their caretakers (ads have recently come out). Using these services, a parent will instantly know where his child is or how the maid is treating the child.
From a security point of view, this sounds like a good device. Which parent does not want to make sure that her child is out of harm’s way? Fair enough.
But what about the child? Isn’t his sense of freedom lost forever, his every moment tracked and monitored? From the house to the lift, from the bus to the classroom, from the gym to the mall—every move, every bit of conversation and action can be recorded. Now, there are even billboards in Japan that can watch your back. A never-ending prison for the child!
Now replace the child with a grown up. You. How would you feel if each and every moment of your life is monitored and available for scanning to the big brother—the government (parent), the banks and financial institutions and powerful corporations of the world? How free will you feel?
And yet, we are increasingly submitting ourselves to 24/7 monitoring, voluntarily abetting to the crime of ending our own privacy and freedom.
When the going gets weird, the weird turns to higher security
In today’s highly insecure, terrorism-threatened times, security has become a prime factor in our lives. For a host a reasons, ranging from personal to state-level paranoia, security is being accorded an intimate place in our lives at a level never seen before in the history of human civilisation.
But the state is not alone in thrusting security upon us. Most often, wittingly or unwittingly, we are inviting security to invade our lives.
Let us briefly examine how it is happening to us or rather, how we are making it happen.
The governments, corporations and financial institutions have already got lots of data on us. And we know its hazards—how millions of people have become victims of identity thefts and scams all over the world.
On top of that, we are increasingly operating in a cashless, plastic money environment. By using credit and debit cards, we are leaving track of all our transactions for Big Brother. What we buy and sell, where we shop, what are our tastes—everything is recorded. We are doing it happily.
Now moving from cards, some countries are introducing payments through mobile phones. Next could be payments through an RFID chip implanted in your body—a one-stop thing for all your identity, that will act as your password to everything—from opening your house’s doors to e-payments.
But imagine the control that the RFID chip will give to the state. Big brother can track your movement and can deactivate the chip to deny you access to your own home and bank account.
Not only are your personal and financial data available to Big Brother, but your day to day activities on the net are also making your life less private. Google knows your search habits (it has many commercial and security-linked implications, that’s why EU is asking Google to delete individual search info—under Draconian security laws, a case might be made against you using Google search key words), Gmail has all your e-mails, GoogleDocs all your documents, Facebook knows all your friends and what you are doing with them, and Flickr! has all your snaps. Just a few examples. All these services are owned by a handful of corporations that are answerable to the state, and the state, in the name of national interest, can make these companies reveal information on individuals.
If the terrorists can take the attacks to Facebook, as reported recently, so can the governments. In this fight, our privacy becomes the loser.
Not just that. Governments are trying to impose blanket content filtering for all Web connections now—it is like fixing a bug in everyone’s internet connection. At the time of writing, lovers of democracy and freedom of speech are opposing a similar move by the Australian government.
There are more examples to show how we are losing or surrendering our privacy. The acceptance of biometrics is another case in point. True, it offers us convenience and speed but it is not corruption-proof. And it makes us traceable.
To fight terror, many governments are taking finger prints and DNA samples of travellers and citizens (some in the UK are fighting against it). In this process, we are all suspects until proven innocent.
Looking at the growing inverse relationship between privacy and security, one can see the human race walking into a no-privacy prison called ‘earth’. With the development of semantic search and artificial intelligence, next on the cards could be ‘thought policing’ a la Minority Report.
Sorry to end the year on such a grim note but blame it on my watching films with dystopian themes such as Children of Men and Body of Lies. Happy holidays and see you next year!
Zafar Anjum is the online editor of MIS Asia portal.
