CHAPTER 31

Identity and Privacy

As people's identities migrate into the ether of digital representation, all manner of questions emerge: Rights, responsibilities, and risks all can be thought of in significantly different terms than they were 20 years ago.

With the launch of Google Plus in 2011, it's an opportune time to think about digital privacy, insofar as Google is explicitly targeting widespread user dissatisfaction with Facebook's treatment of their personal information. The tagging feature, for example, that was used to build a massive (hundreds of millions of users) facial recognition database has important privacy implications. In standard Facebook fashion, it's turned on by default, and opting out once may not guarantee that a user is excluded from the next wave of changes. If a government did that, controversy would likely be intense, but in Facebook's case, people seem to be resigned to the behavior.

According to a 2010 poll of customer satisfaction developed at the University of Michigan, Facebook scored in the bottom 5% of providers—in the range of cable operators, airlines, and the Internal Revenue Service. Even as Facebook is rumored to be holding off user-base announcements for 100-million intervals since a billion is in range, users are defecting. While the service is said to be closing in on 750 million users globally, reports of 1% of that population in the United States and Canada defecting in one month were not confirmed by the company, but neither were they denied. A Google search on “Facebook fatigue” returned nearly 100,000 hits. At the same time, Facebook delivers 31% of the 1.1 trillion ads served in the United States each quarter (Yahoo! is a distant second at 10% share); those ads are expected to represent $4 billion in 2011 revenue.¹

Privacy

With the Facebook initial public offering still pending, the questions about privacy take on more urgency as the firm is being scrutinized. What, really, is privacy? It's clearly a fundamental concept, typically conceived of as a human or civil right. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), privacy is “the state or condition of being alone, undisturbed, or free from public attention, as a matter of choice or right; seclusion; freedom from interference or intrusion.” It's an old word, dating to the fourteenth century, that is constantly being reinvented as times change.

Being left alone in a digital world is a difficult concept, however, given the sheer number of connections. Here, New York University's Helen Nissenbaum is helpful: “What people care most about is not simply restricting the flow of information but ensuring that it flows appropriately.”² Thus, she does not wade further into the definitional swamp but spends a book's worth of analysis on the issue of how people interact with the structures that collect, parse, and move their information.

Through this lens, the listed artifacts cannot be judged as public or private, good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable, but they can be discussed and considered in the context of people's values, choices, and autonomy: When I use X, is my information handled in a way that I consent to in some reasonably informed way? The digital privacy landscape is vast, including some familiar tools, and for all the privacy notices I have received, there is a lot I don't know about the workings of most of these:

• Loyalty card programs
• Google streetview
• Toll-pass radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags
• Surveillance cameras
• Transportation Security Administration (TSA) no-fly lists
• Facebook data and actions
• Credit-rating data
• Amazon browsing and purchase history
• Google search history
• Foursquare check-ins
• Digital camera metadata
• Expressed preferences, such as star ratings, Facebook “likes,” or eBay seller feedback
• Searchable digital public records, such as court dates, house purchases, or bankruptcy
• Cell phone location and connection records
• Medical records, electronic or paper
• Gmail correspondence
• TSA backscatter X-ray
• Item-level billing systems, as used at telecom firms and many others

Does such lack of knowledge mean that I have conceded privacy or that I am exposing aspects of my life I would rather not? Probably both. In addition, the perfection of digital memory—handled properly, bits don't degrade with repeated copying—means that what these entities know, they know for a very long time. The combination, therefore, of lack of popular understanding of the mechanics of personal information and the permanence of that information makes privacy doubly suspect.

Scale

Given the climate of the past 10 years in relation to privacy, the events of 9/11 have conditioned the debate to an extraordinary degree. The U.S. government was reorganized, search and seizure rules were broadened, and rules of the game got more complicated: Not only were certain entities ordered to turn over information related to their customers, they were legally obligated to deny that they had done so. More centrally, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's well-documented failure to connect the dots spurred a reorganization of multiple information silos into a vast and possibly suboptimally sprawling Department of Homeland Security.

Governments have always wanted more information than people typically want to give them. Given the new legal climate along with improvements in the technologies of databases, information retrieval, and image processing, for example, more is known about U.S. individuals than at any time heretofore. (Whether it is known by the proper people and agencies is a separate question.) At the 2000 Super Bowl, for example, the entire crowd was scanned and matched against an image database. Note the rhetoric employed even before the terrorist attack on the twin towers and the Pentagon:

Note that the category of “criminals” can be conveniently defined: the definition in Yemen, Libya, or Pakistan might be debatable, depending on one's perspective. In Tampa, civil liberties were not explicitly addressed, nor was there judicial oversight:

Letting a police force, which in any given locality may have corruption issues, as in large areas of Mexico, use digital records to figuratively stand on a corner and pick “the criminals out of the crowd” without probable cause is scary stuff. Also in the news, a major story concerns an FBI agent who protected his informant (Whitey Bulger) from murder charges. And police officers might not be corrupt: Mexican drug gangs are now being said to threaten U.S. law enforcement officers with harm. Once the information and the technology exist, they will be abused: The issue is how to design safeguards into the process.

Consider RFID toll passes. According to a transportation industry trade journal, the first instance of electronic toll record tracking may have occurred in September 1997,

Again, the potential for privacy abuse emerged before protections did. In 2010, there were nearly 21 million E-ZPass transponders in use, roughly half of the U.S. total number of toll passes: They were read about 2.4 billion times.⁵ As only one in a number of highly revealing artifacts attached to a person's digital identity, toll tokens join a growing number of sensors of which few people are aware. The on-board diagnostics system in a car, expanded from a mechanic's engine diagnostic, has become a “black box” like those recovered from airplane crashes. Progressive Insurance is experimenting with data logging from the devices as a premium-setting tool. Significantly, its tool does not include GPS information; the firm discontinued a GPS-based experiment in 2000.

Invisibility

In its excellent “What They Know” investigative series in 2010, the Wall Street Journal concluded that “they” know a lot. Numbers only scratch the surface of the issues:

• Dictionary.com installed 234 tracking cookies into a browser in a single visit. WSJ.com itself came in below average, at 60. Wikipedia.org was the only site of 50 tested to install zero tracking software files.
• When Microsoft relaunched Internet Explorer in 2008, corporate interests concerned about ad revenue vetoed a plan to make privacy settings persistent. Thus, users have to reset the privacy preferences with every browser restart, and few people are aware of the settings console in the first place.
• The Facebook “like” button connects a behavior (an online vote, a pursuit of a coupon, or an act of whim) to a flesh-and-blood person: The Facebook profile's presumably real name, real age, real sex, and real location. Again according to the Journal:

  For example, Facebook or Twitter know when one of their members reads an article about filing for bankruptcy on MSNBC.com or goes to a blog about depression called Fighting the Darkness, even if the user doesn't click the “Like” or “Tweet” buttons on those sites. For this to work, a person only needs to have logged into Facebook or Twitter once in the past month. The sites will continue to collect browsing data, even if the person closes their browser or turns off their computers, until that person explicitly logs out of their Facebook or Twitter accounts, the study found.⁶

• Few people realize how technologies can be used to follow them from one realm to another. The giant advertising firm WPP recently launched Xaxis, which, according to the Wall Street Journal (in a story separate from its “What They Know” series),

  will manage what it describes as the “world's largest” database of profiles of individuals that includes demographic, financial, purchase, geographic and other information collected from their Web activities and brick-and-mortar transactions. The database will be used to personalize ads consumers see on the Web, social-networking sites, mobile phones and ultimately, the TV set.⁷

• A team at Carnegie Mellon University combined off-the-shelf facial recognition software, large cloud computing databases, and readily available social networking data to identify strangers and gain their personal information. According to the lead researcher, “When we share tagged photos of ourselves online, it becomes possible for others to link our face to our names in situations where we would normally expect anonymity.”⁸ Given that none of these technologies is particularly difficult to obtain, the results suggest that anonymity might be a soon-to-be obsolete notion.

In each of these examples, it's pretty clear that all of these companies ignored, or at least lightly valued, Nissenbaum's notion of contextual integrity as it relates to the individual. Given the lack of tangible consequences, it makes economic sense for them to do so.

Identity

Given that digital privacy seems almost to be a quaint notion in the United States (Europeans live and are legally protected differently), a deeper question emerges: If that OED sense of freedom from intrusion is being reshaped by our many digital identities, who are we and what do we control? Ads, spam, nearly continuous interruption (if we let ourselves listen), and an often-creepy sense of “how did they know that?” as LinkedIn, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Netflix hone in our most cherished idiosyncrasies—all of these are embedded in the contemporary connected culture. Many sites, such as Lifehacker, recommend frequent pruning: E-mail offers, coupon sites, Twitter feeds, and Facebook friends can multiply out of control, and saying no often requires more deliberation than does joining up.

Who am I? Not to get metaphysical, but the context for that question is in flux. My fifth-grade teacher was fond of saying “Tell me who your friends are and I'll tell you who you are.” What would he say to today's fifth grader, who may well text 8,000 times a month and have a public Facebook page?

Does it matter that a person's political alignment, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, and zip code (a reasonable proxy for household income) are often now a matter of public, searchable record? Is her identity different now that some many facets of it are transparent? Or is it a matter of Mark Zuckerberg's vision—people have one identity, and transparency is good for relationships—being implicitly shared more widely across the planet? Some reviews of Google Plus argued that people don't mind having one big list of “friends,” even as Facebook scored poorly in customer satisfaction indexes year after year.

Indeed, one solution to the privacy dilemma is to overshare: If nothing can possibly be held close, secrets lose their potency, perhaps. (For an example, see the story of Hasan Elahi and his Tracking Transience Web site in the May 2007 issue of Wired magazine and in Albert-László Barabási's book Bursts.) The recent spread of YouTube pregnancy-test videos is fascinating: One of life's most meaningful, trajectory-altering moments is increasingly an occasion to show the world the heavy (water) drinking, the trips to the pharmacy and the toilet, and the little colored indicator, followed by the requisite reaction shots. (For more, see Marisa Meltzer's piece on Slate, wonderfully titled “WombTube.”⁹)

The other extreme, opting out, is difficult. Living without a mobile phone, without electronic books, without MP3 music files, without e-mail, and of course without Facebook or Google is difficult for many to comprehend. In fact, the decision to unplug (usually temporarily) frequently goes hand in hand with a book project about “My Six Months Offline,” so unheard-of is the notion.

At the same time, the primacy of the word represented by these massive information flows leaves out at least 10% of the adult U.S. population: Functional illiteracy, by its very nature, is difficult to measure. One shocking statistic, presented without attribution by the Detroit Literacy Coalition, pegs the number in that metro area at a stunning 47%. Given a core population of about 4 million in the three-county area, that's well over 1 million adults who have few concerns with Twitter feeds, Google searches, or allocating their 401(k) portfolio.

Looking Ahead

Between the extremes of oversharing and opting out, where most Americans now live, there's an abundance of gray area. As “what they know,” in the Journal's words, grows and what they can do with it expands, perhaps the erosion of analog notions of privacy will be steady but substantial. Another possibility is some high-profile, disproportionately captivating event that galvanizes reaction. The fastest adoption of a technology in modern times is not GPS, or DVD, or even Facebook: It was the U.S. government's Do Not Call registry. Engineering privacy into browsers, cell phones, and very large data stores is unlikely; litigation is, unfortunately, a more likely outcome: In 2011, a U.S. federal judge refused to halt a class-action suit against Google's practice of using its Street View cars for Wi-Fi sniffing. The story of privacy, while old, is entering a fascinating, and exasperating, new phase, and much remains to be learned, tested, and accepted as normal.

Notes

1. Stephanie Reese, “Quick Stat: Facebook to Bring In $4.05 Billion In Ad Revenues This Year,” emarketer.com, April 26, 2011, www.emarketer.com/blog/index.php/tag/facebook-ad-revenue/.

2. Helen Nissenbaum, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Law Books, 2010), p. 2.

3. Jeanne Bonner, “Looking For Faces In The Super Bowl Crowd,” SecuritySolutions.com, May 1, 2001, http://securitysolutions.com/mag/security_looking_faces_super/.

4. “Electronic Toll Records Are Watching You, “FleetOwner.com, December 12, 2003, http://fleetowner.com/news/fleet_electronic_toll_records/.

5. E-ZPass Group, Statistics, www.e-zpassiag.com/about-us/statistics.

6. Amir Efrati, “ ‘Like’ Button Follows Web Users,” Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704281504576329441432995616.html#ixzz1QhgQ8FEj.

7. Emily Steel, “WPP Ad Unit Has Your Profile,” Wall Street Journal, June 27, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304447804576409562922859314.html#ixzz1Qhf7pHeS.

8. Carnegie Mellon News, “Face Recognition Software, Social Media Sites Increase Privacy Risks, Says New Carnegie Mellon Study,” Press Release, August 1, 2011, www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2011/august/aug1_privacyrisks.html.

9. Marisa Meltzer, “Wombtube,” Slate.com, March 14, 2011, www.slate.com/id/2286434/.

10. http://projects.wsj.com/jettracker/.

11. John Croft, “FAA Guts Block Aircraft Registration Programme,” Flightglobal.com, June 2, 2011, www.flightglobal.com/articles/2011/06/02/357399/faa-gutsblock-aircraft-registration-programme.html.