Reading 06: Having Privacy vs Keeping Secrets

“You’ve got nothing to worry about, if you’ve got nothing to hide”. I’ve always been at odds with this quote, because whenever I rethink or look at it from a different angle, I’m always either agreeing with it or finding some flaw in it and it’s a cycle that happens over and over again.

However, I can’t help but think about a question my friend said: “Why do we leave our homes unlocked?”. Then the question extended further: “If there was total surveillance and through that accountability, would it be weird to still leave our homes unlocked?”. The initial worry would be that people could steal our property, or something of value. But in a world with surveillance, that wouldn’t be possible. So what’s the danger here?

It’s tough to initially see those dangers, and I think sometimes I like to invalidate those dangers myself which is why I’m so wishy-washy on this issue. I think that a lot of it comes to my exposure to social media and the tech industry’s big players. Social media facets such as Facebook and Twitter and tech industry giant Google emphasize that their products and vision act as forces of good. However, we’ve seen major privacy issues with these companies come up as well where Facebook user data was leaked during the last presidential elect and where Google was found to keep track of users’ locations even when they had the location GPS feature turned off. However, we still use these products because they have become quite integral in our lives, yet because of this are blind to the dangers they hold.

This made me think about the book, “The Circle” by Dave Eggers. Back when it was published in 2013, its situation was taken as by most reviewers, too futuristic or implausible to apply to society. However, it’s interesting that as time went by, the books premise became less of a distant dystopic sci-fi, but more of a increasingly close reality. The book presents an almost monopoly-like tech giant (just like Google now), where the next main technology the company wants to feature is live streaming services which the main character becomes in charge of. She’s spearheading the initiative of the world becoming more and more transparent, as the company belief is that transparency is the solution to a utopia. And in the book, it has, there’s virtually no crime since everyone’s held accountable, and the inexcusable behavior of people online dwindled. So she becomes a celebrity of sorts, where she basically has to stream and wants to stream her entire life (except for bathroom breaks), and people fall in love with that image of her. But that’s a problem the book presents. With constant eyes on her, she doesn’t even realize that her behavior’s changing for the worse, people in her life start to distance themselves away from her because they don’t want to be involved in that sort of transparency. It’s almost to close to reality now with Facebook Live, Twitter Periscope, and Twitch where these services stream streamer content, which can lead to privacy issues as well. In the book, it becomes pushed to the extreme with everything essentially being live-streamed all the time,

I think the main unseen danger is the possibility of using that innocuous information to guide, direct, or take advantage of people based off of their information to tailor to specific company or governmental needs. For example, if I walked into a Target supermarket, and they had cameras and scanners tracking whatever I bought, Target could use that information later on to advertise to me possible wants that are more tailored to me the next time I come in. However, if people are being held accountable for all aspects of their lives, then their could easily be marketing that implies “if you don’t buy this, then we’re going to imply that you’re missing out”. For more examples, would you say no to donating to a cause at the cashier register with thousands of people possibly watching you? Maybe you just really couldn’t spend more money that day, maybe you could but honestly you just don’t want to, but with decisions becoming more and more narrow with surveillance, individuality slowly gets lost, and with that the degradation of humanity. As what we see on the camera screen, isn’t always the truth.