Kissmyrobot

Ouch! Ouch! My robot won’t stop zapping me with his electric punishment electrode – so much for Asimov’s first law of robotics. He says it’s for my own good – and for the good of humanity. He says I need to try to clear my head and make some sense of all these privacy issues that are raining down from all directions.

But the truth is, I don’t know where to start. There are so many issues swimming around in my head – e-mail privacy at work, the release of YouTube users’ records, Internet monitoring through Telecoms, RFID chips, airport officials confiscating laptops, ISPs letting companies track our web journeys, etc. – that I’ve been putting off writing about anything at all.

One of the first places we can turn to in order to start making sense of it all is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and it’s quite a nice website, too. The EFF follows all major developments in the digital age that affect our rights and liberties, and helps you get involved.

Although it’s especially relevant for US citizens, it’s a treasure chest of accessible information that does or could affect anyone using digital devices and information. A quick look on its home page shows debate on a range of issues: bloggers’ rights, e-mail privacy, security, telecom immunity and travel screening.

In a few days, I’ll be flying into Canada, which apparently just recently ushered in a new bill giving airports the right to search the content of laptops. Apparently, there wasn’t much debate about the bill and its consequences until it was too late – just try searching for it online. A lot of people aren’t too happy, but can they do anything about it now? I hope so.

If I was carrying a diary or a folder of confidential work documents, would I have to hand those over for inspection, too? I wonder what they’d do if I left my battery out? Should I try? Better not risk it.

My robot just read George Orwell’s “1984” and it nearly scared the pants off him. Ok, it would have, if he wore pants. He wasn’t scared of the book’s story, but rather the parallels his artificial intelligence found with our lives today. He’s puzzled that it seems we, humans, have read the book and thought “Cool, let’s do that!” rather than “Crap, that’s some scary stuff. Let’s steer clear.”

I told him that I guess that’s what makes us different from robots; we’re often acting not on reason alone, but through a maze of socialization, advertising and propaganda that is tailored to our deepest psychological worries and fears. We can also be masochistic, bent on destruction, and often just plain stupid to boot.

The problem with the 1984 scenario, though, is that it creeps up on us. We get use to the loss of privacy as it evolves and are smothered with campaigns about the benefits we’ll reap, be it security, convenience or better targeted advertisements. Funny, mind you, how I feel less safe than a few years ago, more stressed and try to block advertisements on my browser to the best of my ability (thank goodness for the Firefox Adblock Plus add-on!).

But anyway, my point is that the negative consequences are nearly always downplayed and rarely debated in the public sphere. And they’re not minor. They involve huge sacrifices that American revolutionaries wouldn’t come near without a loaded gun.

There are individuals and groups trying to raise the alarm, but they rarely seem to hit mainstream. When I tell my friends that I’m concerned about my name, personal details and credit card number being scattered across the Web, and don’t want to allow Facebook mini-application developers to access to my personal details, some of them wonder if I don’t have better things to worry about. It’s just something you have to live with. Or is it?

There’s an interesting article in a recent issue of the ACM magazine “Communications” about the psychology of risk. It seems that most people don’t realize how vulnerable they really are to identity theft, virus attacks, and so on. Unless the consequences are perceived to be as strong as the potential benefits, people will generally make “safe” decisions. But this is all warped when you take into account the immediacy of the costs and benefits. If the benefits are now and the cost is later… well, we all know how credit cards work.

But back to the negative consequences. We are being so completely sucked into the World Wide Web, through which everything we buy, read, view, write, post, comment, rent and bid on can be, or is, being monitored by companies, the authorities or both – and usually they’re one and the same.

Soon, with the magic of cloud computing, we’ll be writing our reports, compiling our monthly budget spreadsheets, and writing our personal diaries on servers far away from where we sit at a lonely little terminal. And these servers can be confiscated by the authorities with a flimsy warrant, or, better yet, with nothing when your government has passed through an act that gives it power to snoop through anything – not that it usually refrains from doing so without one.

But they can’t possibly sift through all that information! Oh yes, they can. Millions are being spent on developing software that digs through all the information on the web to find links and patterns, images and personal records. The Internet actually makes it a lot easier for them to keep tabs, not on criminals or t*rrorists, but on the average Jane Doe, her political and religious affiliations, her spending habits, her health record and so on.

And you know what? This is really how it is.

But oh! the convenience is worth it. Is it really? I sometimes wish we’d wake up and realize that it’s all been a very bad dream. It’s been fun, but I want my life back

Imagine…

It’s 10 years ago and you’re browsing the aisles of the public library, you pull out a book here and there to look at the cover, scan the description on the back and maybe even flip through it, and usually you put it back on the shelf. A few look useful, though, so you bring them back to a PC station, insert your floppy disk, and start working on your essay.

Later on, you go to the mall to check out some CDs, but you’re broke, so you put them back and save them for a rainy day. Then you wander down the street and check out some flyers pasted on the light posts for a concert that night, go to a pay phone to convince a friend to come, and later that night, you’re enjoying the show.

Imagine…

It’s today, and you’re browsing Amazon online for some new reading material. Each book you click on is recorded in your personal file, even if you don’t buy it. You do a bit of work on your article, checking facts and quotes online as needed. After a while, you get restless so you go to iTunes to download a few songs you’ve noted from your favorite online radio station.

You notice an advert for a band you like – they’re playing a show just out of town. You click on it to see if tickets are available, and then buy them online. Each page you’ve been to, each thing you’ve downloaded, each thing you’ve bought has been tracked in one way or another, by one company or another. Later that week when you’re walking with a friend to the show, you’re snapped by three different surveillance cameras.

But you sure needed the break since you were fired from your job – your constructive criticism of a co-worker on your personal web page was brought to the attention of your supervisor. You’ve since removed the content, but caching allows it to be found through search.

Imagine…

It’s 10 years in the future. Everything you read, write, look at and do is stored online. You just login to any terminal, anywhere, to access all digital content that is you.

Your insurance company knows you’ve been looking at articles on diabetes and has upped your rate by 200 per cent, even though it’s your friend who thinks she may have the disease. Your mortgage broker refuses to give you a better deal because she can see that you don’t monitor your finances regularly enough. She’s also wondering if you have diabetes. And why you’ve stopped shopping so often on Ebay.

The administration is monitoring every e-mail you write and every piece of content you come across ever since you wrote that article on the connection between the growth of opium trafficking and t*rrorism, especially because they can see how many people saw it – who, when, and from where.

The city’s blanket wireless internet service has been brought down by hackers who have infected thousands of online applications with malicious software. Countless residents – whose personal details and generated content have been exposed – are now vulnerable to extortion and identity theft. You’re hoping you’re not one of them, or you may have to cancel your trip to Portugal.

Most victims can’t leave the country until they agree to have a microchip implant that will locate them anywhere and track their every move. They may not, after all, be who they say they are. Every newborn is having the implant now anyway, thanks to new legislation passed since the latest attacks.

The security robot at the airport, armed with a lethal handgun, is scanning all IDs, retinas and thumb prints, just to be safe. Meanwhile, the latest war between our robot army is taking a mild hit by the mostly civilian army of Lalaland, who have lost some 50,000 soldiers so far.

OK. So that was a worst case scenario, right? Right? I hope so, too. I just couldn’t help pondering the differences that have happened in my lifetime, and so fast. Some call it progress, and I admit that there are conveniences I would find very difficult now to live without, but technological innovation for the sake of itself can’t be considered progress unless it advances the well being and worth of humankind.

I went to a human-computer interaction conference a couple of years ago and walked away bewildered. I couldn’t believe some of the amazing things that were being developed, but more than that, I couldn’t believe how little value it brought 90 percent of the world’s population. So much money is being spent on the innovation of trivial things, while millions of people are still starving to death, dying from AIDS or being flooded out of their make-shift homes.

But I know there is another story. There are people and companies building things to help humanity, and that is my project: to root them out and tell all my friends. Maybe even invest in one if I can.