Conserve Privacy

A precious resource needs careful stewardship

By Scott Berinato

December 23, 2002 — CSO — The state of privacy is generally debated in black-and-white: Either it is alive or it is dead. Of course, it's actually in between, gray. What would work better for talking about the state of privacy is the vocabulary of conservation. Think of privacy as a limited natural resource. In some places, it's thriving. In others, we've clear-cut. Gone unmanaged, it will run out.

And George Orwell is privacy's John Muir. Each wrote prophetically of dangers to come. But while Muir founded the Sierra Club, Orwells creepy forecast didnt spawn an analogous organization. And now the analogs between 1984's privacy-deprived Oceania and modern, IT-based America are sometimes startling. In Oceania, telescreens were omnipresent and accepted. We rarely escape televisions, computers, PDAs or cell phones. Telescreens monitored behavior, too, making sure party members performed morning calisthenics. We monitor e-mail, Web browsing, even keystrokes, to ensure corporate calisthenics are getting done.

In 1984, the state methodically stripped the population of privacy and individual identity. This Orwell got wrong. In 2003, it's largely corporations doing it. (Give the state time, though. The Total Information Awareness effort within the Department of Homeland Security, and aspects of the USA Patriot Act, such as the one that threatens to cut funding if schools don't turn over personal information about students for military recruiting purposes, has renewed with terrific vigor the use of the term Orwellian). Big Brother turned out not to be a totalitarian regime hell-bent on absolute power, but rather a matrix of capitalist regimes addicted to money. Still, the effect is largely the samefar less individual privacy.

What's more startling than the similarities between Orwells vision and our reality, though, is that 1984 doesn't much startle us anymore.

For example, we now accept surveillance in public places such as stadiums; we divulge our salaries to get a bike warranty; and we let grocery stores tax us if we refuse to let them monitor our shopping habits through "loyalty cards." (Loyalty card is a good example of Orwell's "newspeak"the state-controlled language in which ungood meant bad). And like Orwell's Ingsoc party members, we seem to be fine with all of this.

We weren't always. In 1949, the New York Times praised Owell's masterpiece as "a work of pure horror, and it's horror is crushingly immediate." And yet we are not horrified by the many ways in which his dark prophecy has come true. What used to be sinister and abhorrent now appears in a constant stream of sunny, putative (newspeak follows) "value propositions." Yes, we're taking away privacy, the argument goes, but you get something good in return. Constant surveillance will help us root out terrorists; personal data for warranties allows a bike company to better understand our needs; the grocery store can give us better coupons!

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