The fear of being watched, once the domain of conspiracy theorists and tinfoil milliners, is transcending mere paranoia to become a valid post-millennial concern. The stark difference is that now, it's less a question of whether we're being tracked but rather how, and by whom.
Electronic passports, which contain a chip imprinted with travellers' photos and personal information, are set to roll out in Canada this year, as a growing number of national headlines are giving Canadians pause about their privacy.
In February, an Ottawa newspaper unmasked the anonymous Twitter account Vikileaks30 - which was being used to publish personal information about Public Safety Minister Vic Toews - as originating on Parliament Hill, using a technique available to anyone with moderate computer savvy.
The robocalls scandal, in which misdirecting calls were made to voters on election day, has been similarly unravelling in spite of fraudster ``Pierre Poutine's'' use of a prepaid cellphone, prepaid credit card, and numerous false addresses.
David Murakami Wood, Canada Research Chair in Surveillance Studies, says the bottom line is that true anonymity is no longer possible - at least, not if you want to live a life that's in any way connected to other people or institutions.
``The psychological effects of trying to remain anonymous today are quite severe,'' says Murakami Wood, pointing to such outcomes as extreme paranoia, depression and anxiety. ``Like in any other time in history, you could go live on a desert island somewhere. But even that doesn't make you un-locatable.''
Although most finger-wagging is directed at ``Big Brother,'' Murakami Wood says Canadians too often overlook the privacy concessions they make every day, by doing something as simple as performing an Internet search or logging onto a website.
In 2011, Facebook earned some $1 billion on sales of $3.7 billion, with advertising accounting for a whopping 85 per cent of revenue. And all this occurred to the soundtrack of thousands of disgruntled voices protesting the company's dubious handling of their personal information.
``It takes a much smaller number of people to change the minds of government than it does to change the policies of a corporation,'' explains Murakami Wood, an associate professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont. ``So we're voluntarily revealing more and more about ourselves in order to maintain the kind of social lives we want.''
Another challenge, according to information scientist Eric Meyers, is overly long and complex end-user licence agreements - on software installations, for instance - to which the majority of people reflexively agree and thus become vulnerable to monitoring and third-party contact.
He says the extent to which Canadians - and younger generations in particular - actually care is another question.
``It's the Wild West, essentially,'' says Meyers, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia's School of Library, Archival and Information Studies. ``Having been raised on these technologies, they're part of (youths') cultural milieu. So when they're told there are problems in terms of how much they're exposed, it's difficult for them to grasp the long-term consequences.''
A Canadian study in 2011 found adolescents indeed reveal more on Facebook than older users, but the disparity was largely explained by their comparatively heavy use of the site. And the desire to belong was shown to motivate Canadians of all ages to put more of their lives online.
Also affecting privacy is the fast rise of radio frequency identification tags, whose contactless scanning technology is being applied to everything from loyalty cards to Canada's new epassports.
Though RFID has been shown to put information at risk (a thief with a special sensor, for example, can read your credit card right through your wallet), officials say it's ``extremely unlikely that the data stored on the (epassport) chip could be read without the knowledge of the passport holder,'' explaining that the information can't be accessed unless the machine-readable zone on page two has been scanned - which means the passport must be open.
Despite its protections, the epassport will likely be added to the list of Canadians' new privacy concerns - ones that make previous panic over traffic cameras and street surveillance seem quaint by comparison.
Smartphones are turning ordinary bystanders into mobile security cameras, with police increasingly turning to such ``citizen surveillance'' to identify wrongdoers in public riots.
Global positioning systems in our cars and hand-held devices allow our location to be pinpointed within 12 inches. And IP-tracing technology has become so accessible that digital footprints might as well be a tattoo.
Even consumers' humdrum shopping preferences are now traceable. New electronic product codes, for example, add a unique serial number to traditional bar codes, with enough possible combinations to individually tag every grain of sand in the world - and indeed for marketers to know exactly which piece of fruit or can of cola ends up in your fridge.
But according to Andrew Clement, co-founder of the Identity, Privacy and Security Institute at the University of Toronto, the erosion of anonymity doesn't necessarily point to the end of privacy but rather a transformation in how we see it.
``If you think of privacy as confidentiality, anonymity and seclusion, you've lost the battle because almost anything we do in contemporary society produces a stream of personal information,'' says Clement, a professor in the faculty of information. ``I think it's more usefully conceived of as informational self-determination.''
In other words, having greater control over how your personal details are shared with others, and holding information custodians - whether marketers, institutions or government - accountable for what they do with them.
``We need to put the onus much more on the organizations to be transparent,'' says Clement. ``I don't think we really know the consequences of what it means to have so much detailed information about us being collected in these large databases.''
mharris(at)postmedia.com
No comments:
Post a Comment