The Pew Internet and American Life project released Part II of its Future of the Internet report. Run by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie, the content aggregated in this report is simply worth its weight in gold. In the study, Pew brought together a number of highly respected experts and asked them to respond to some possible scenarios. While the report as a whole is very useful, I felt that section 4 of the report would be of interest to readers.
Pew posed the following question:
As sensing, storage and communication technologies get cheaper and better, individuals’ public and private lives will become increasingly ‘transparent’ globally. Everything will be more visible to everyone, with good and bad results. Looking at the big picture – at all of the lives affected on the planet in every way possible – this will make the world a better place by the year 2020. The benefits will outweigh the costs.
The respondents split, with 46% agreeing and 49% disagreeing. Personally, I’m blown away that half of Pew’s expert panel seems to accept the underlying assumption of the question – that privacy won’t really be an option in 2020. Pew, explaining the current status of surveillance issues, states:
Your life is being recorded in various ways today. Your cell phone is a tracking device. Your personal life and financial status are recorded in various databases. Anyone in the world can find out the tax-assessed value of your home with a 10-second internet search. And, with the further development of “IP on everything,” the concept that people and goods will be tagged and trackable on the network through the use of sensors, things are becoming more complex and more transparent simultaneously.
Billions of radio frequency ID (RFID) tags are already in use due to their growing adoption by retailers (such as Wal-Mart) and government agencies (such as the U.S. Department of Defense). The fairly inexpensive, nearly invisible devices are used as a means to improve efficiency. They can be used to track inventory, equipment and personnel; they may replace bar codes. One estimate finds that corporations making RFID devices will make more than $24 billion a year by 2016.
In a sense, we’re already living in this world. As I type this note, my computer is attached to an internet connection that records my presence; when I present a credit card at the store, I am further recorded – and who knows how many surveillance cameras record my every move. What we lack – what gives us this notion of privacy, is the fact the mesh network that would bring all of this information together doesn’t yet exist (outside of the NSA). How reminiscent of the Facebook feeds fiasco – yes, all my information is out there – but when it is in one place, I am no longer comfortable with it.
In the report, Cory Doctorow and Hal Varian weigh in on a social contract for privacy.
Boing Boing blogger Cory Doctorow, an EFF Fellow, wrote, “Transparency and privacy aren’t antithetical. We’re perfectly capable of formulating widely honored social contracts that prohibit pointing telescopes through your neighbours’ windows. We can likewise have social contracts about sniffing your neighbours’ network traffic.” And Hal Varian of Google and the UC-Berkeley wrote, “Privacy is a thing of the past. Technologically it is obsolete. However, there will be social norms and legal barriers that will dampen out the worst excesses.”
Barry Wellman explores the nature of power and privacy:
Barry Wellman, a researcher on virtual communities and workplaces and the director of NetLab at the University of Toronto, responded, “The less one is powerful, the more transparent his or her life. The powerful will remain much less transparent.”
A fascinating report. You can download a free copy at the Pew site, and you can view the complete remarks of the experts at this site. Note: Cross-blogged to the claimID blog.
Tags: culture, information, pew, study
Are we equal in a fully data transparent society if we can’t all access everything about everybody?
Its seems to me the issue at hand is making sure everyone has as much access as everyone else. In the future the privacy dangers may occur when some people or orgs have access to more data than other people or orgs. I certain this kind of equal access will be very hard to achieve.
What do you think Fred? Nice blog post. Thanks for sharing. :)
I was very eager to read this report but alas — I had to drop it from the summary. I strongly disagree with both their findings and their methodology, and I can’t understand how clever people have gone so wrong, asking the least representative sample what their though, and compiling data with flat percentage, as if their area of expertise (the reason why they were chosen) had no impact or their opinions. Uncritical, unchallenging, insighless: this was the tipical work of a commission, something usually designed to bury issue; Internet future is not to be looked backwards, though.
The same type of people wrote in 1990 that the cell phone had no future, and ten years earlier that data exchange could hardly interrest anyone beyond academics.
I made praising references to Pew two weeks ago, and I already regret it.
Bertil – but their sample isn’t representative. This is a poll of a non-representative sample. This is more delphi than it is anything else. In essence, this is a collection of VIP’s insights into the future – so you have to take it at what is worth. I don’t see any reason to be so hard on it, unless you expected to get something else out of it that it wasn’t. This is a poll of experts and nothing else.