Friday, May 21, 2004
Privacy is finally dead
You’re not paranoid. They do know where you live, and they are coming to get you. To prove it, Reason magazine gave its 40,000 readers a personalised front cover on this week’s edition which contained their own name, along with an aerial photo of their home circled in red.
The magazine also told the individual readers of such details as their average commuting time, the percentage of neighbours who have college degrees, and how many children are cared for by their grandparents.
The scary thing is that all this information – and more – is freely available to those who know how to go looking for it.
“Living in a database nation definitely raises innumerable privacy concerns and we don’t want to evolve into a police state,� editor Nick Gillespie says. “But these databases also make life easier and more prosperous. I'm not particularly worried about a grocery store knowing my purchasing records because what are they really going to do with that information except try to get me back into their store by giving me more stuff for less money? We may have kissed privacy goodbye—and good riddance, too.�
Well, if that makes Gillespie happy, it appals me. We are getting scarily close to the world of Big Brother (1984) or The Matrix.
And lest you think that is just America, in Britain the number of closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) monitoring the streets has quadrupled in the past three years to four million. Britain has also just announced plans for a compulsory identity card scheme that will give police powers to stop and check people against a biometric database. People will be scanned on the spot and the results compared with national fingerprint or iris records.
You’re not paranoid. They do know where you live, and they are coming to get you. To prove it, Reason magazine gave its 40,000 readers a personalised front cover on this week’s edition which contained their own name, along with an aerial photo of their home circled in red.
The magazine also told the individual readers of such details as their average commuting time, the percentage of neighbours who have college degrees, and how many children are cared for by their grandparents.
The scary thing is that all this information – and more – is freely available to those who know how to go looking for it.
“Living in a database nation definitely raises innumerable privacy concerns and we don’t want to evolve into a police state,� editor Nick Gillespie says. “But these databases also make life easier and more prosperous. I'm not particularly worried about a grocery store knowing my purchasing records because what are they really going to do with that information except try to get me back into their store by giving me more stuff for less money? We may have kissed privacy goodbye—and good riddance, too.�
Well, if that makes Gillespie happy, it appals me. We are getting scarily close to the world of Big Brother (1984) or The Matrix.
And lest you think that is just America, in Britain the number of closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) monitoring the streets has quadrupled in the past three years to four million. Britain has also just announced plans for a compulsory identity card scheme that will give police powers to stop and check people against a biometric database. People will be scanned on the spot and the results compared with national fingerprint or iris records.
