the end of privacy

This is the post where I sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist. I generally deride the claims that the government is watching every move we make; and I am not either pro- or anti-government, but rather believe we are placed under the systems that God has ordained. I am hoping that these facts provide a little validity to some of my anti-government-sounding, paranoid views below.

I read 1984 one time and that time was about fifteen years ago. While a lot of people view the society described in that book as a likely danger I thought the ideas proposed were ridiculously paranoid when I read them, and I largely still do think that way. I do think that there is one thing about that book that is an eventual inevitability in every society because of advances in technology, though. We will be monitored and that monitoring will be functionally similar the thought police described in the book.

One of the main focuses of 1984 is that people are constantly monitored and that potentially subversive elements of society are detected and spied on by thought police. While I do not like the government conspiracy aspect of the idea, the fact is that technology is going to get to the point in the not-too-distant future where every government (and corporation, and many individuals) will be able to almost accidentally monitor almost everyone in the world effortlessly. It will just take a different form than the book described.

One example is through social media. There is a lot you can tell about people from what they write even when they are purposely trying to hide it. The types of reactions that people post to things they read online, what they say about their preferences or who they admire, when they are active online, what aspects of themselves they decide to share or not to share, et al. I know there is already enough information available on this blog to provide a rather comprehensive personality and psychological profile on me if you know what to look for. Some day automated profiles will be created for everyone who has ever done anything public online simply because the software will be available to collect, parse, and categorize the relevant, freely-available data. Eventually, it will be easy to know everyone who is a threat to commit a certain crime in the future, or who poses a likely threat to a government, or who is the most prone to overpay for the things they buy. Not only that, but the profiles will provide information on everyone's weaknesses and drives, and so will detail how to keep them from doing those things the government does not want them to do. There will not be people who are thought police, but the function will exist through the stuff that we willingly share because that will be the price we pay for a convenient life.

Another example is through old-fashioned monitoring, but in a far less centralized way than was foreseen in 1984. In the book the government did all of the monitoring and no one else really got to know anything meaningful about their neighbors, but in reality we will do the monitoring and our connection with those around use will be what also provides information about us to everyone else who wants to know. People already geo-tag images and video that they upload to cheap or free. Eventually, there will be little point to not be recording and uploading your own video constantly, and some service will exist to collect all of that live video to get monitoring of everything happening everywhere where someone happens to have their device-with-a-camera-in-it (cellphones now, but who knows in the future) running. This is only one source of video. A lot of household products will eventually use video as a source of input (sort of like how the XBox 360 Kinect works), so a lot of inadvertent household audio/video will be made more public than people realize. This sounds bad, but it gets even creepier.

While most people will have video on them most of the time they are in public, simple images are not going to be the only thing that will be collected. Again, since it will be so easy to do, most of that video will eventually be hooked up to software that measures microexpressions. These are small and involuntary expressions that exist on people's faces for short enough periods of time that betray how they are feeling, and they are generally too short for most people to notice. A microexpression would not give away what specifically the person was thinking, but rather that he or she was unintentionally expressing boredom, distraction, contempt, physical attraction, stress, or any number of other feelings. With constant video and software to detect our feelings, the necessary facades of civilized society will disappear. To some people this may sound like a positive thing, but it truly will be more a curse than it will be a blessing. There are a lot of things that we really should not know about each other, and much of it has to do with how we feel about each other in specific situations. On top of that, the video that is collected containing peoples' reactions to different situations will be used to build personality and psychological profiles for every person alive who ever ventures into public or interacts with anyone else.

So, my prediction here is simply this. I think the people who are paranoid about online privacy are right that almost no one appreciates what they are giving up by using social media services, such as this blog for example. I also think, however, that resistance is futile simply because it will be impossible to hide from all of the possible ways to collect data, and even if you found a way to successfully do so that would only make you look suspicious to those you are trying to hide from. Frankly, it will say something about you that you are trying to avoid detection in the first place. Our experiences, our emotions, and our very existences will be naked and on display for the world to see. So, rather than being scared about what is going to happen anyway, enjoy your privacy while you still have it. Fear and paranoia won't look good on a personality profile anyway.