Very chilling effects
I’ve worried for years about a terrible and under-appreciated danger of privacy intrusion, which in a recent post I characterized as a chilling effect upon the exercise of ordinary freedoms. When government — or an organization such as your employer, your insurer, etc. — watches you closely, it can be dangerous to deviate from the norm. Even the slightest non-conformity could have serious consequences. I wish that were an exaggeration; let’s explore why it isn’t.
Possible difficulties — most of them a little bit futuristic — include:
- Being perceived as a potential terrorist or terrorist sympathizer. That’s a biggie, of course, at least in “free” countries. Even getting on the No-Fly List is enough to pretty much shut down your travel, and hence your options in many careers. If you want to avoid such problems, it might be prudent not to:
- Visit certain websites.
- Email, telephone, or otherwise communicate with certain people.
- Use certain words or phrases in email or on the telephone.
- Being regarded as too vehement a political dissenter in general. Political dissent is deadly dangerous in too many countries around the world, and has costs even in “free” countries. (Jacob Appelbaum is one recent US example.) To avoid such problems, there are a whole lot of things you might think twice about writing, saying, or doing, and certain people it’s definitely risky to associate with or write nice things about.
- Not being regarded as a probable loyal, hard-working, accepting employee. Think about the difficulties “over-qualified” candidates have getting hired. Then consider what might happen if employers had (accurate or otherwise) psychographic profiles estimating who was most likely to stay at a job, to accept boring job tasks or long hours, or to tolerate sub-standard pay. Then consider how wise it might be to show interest in, for example:
- Other careers.
- Certain hobbies that might be construed as leading to other careers.
- Living in other parts of the country.
- Being perceived as likely to engage in socially-unapproved sexual behavior. In the United States, certain sexual choices — even among consenting adults — could cause problems with discrimination, child custody, or divorce. Elsewhere, your choice of partner could lead to prison or even death. (I don’t know exactly which shopping choices could get one identified as a possible homosexual or philanderer … but just to be on the safe side, you might not want to download any Barbara Streisand songs. 🙂 )
- Being regarded as a poor health or safety risk for employment, insurance, or more. Do you like fatty foods? Extreme sports? Night clubs? Recreational drugs? Tobacco? More than a little alcohol? Fast cars? Fast women? Evidence of any of those tastes could move you up the risk charts for heart attack, accident, marital dissolution or some other outcome that an employer or insurer wouldn’t like.
And it goes on. My late mother’s favorite aunt, Genja Jonas, was a prominent photographer; indeed, the collection of her photographs I inherited is probably rather valuable. One of her specialties was photographing children. In Germany, in her day, children often ran around in the nude. Just looking into her work too closely could reasonably be regarded as a signal of pedophiliac intent.
What makes these dangers so great is the confluence of two sets of factors:
- Some basic facts of human nature and organizational behavior — policies and procedures are biased against risk of “bad” outcomes, because people (and organizations) fear (being caught) making mistakes.
- Technological developments that make ever more precise judgments as to what constitutes risk, or deviation from “proven-safe” profiles.
Thus:
- There’s a bias to stick with what has been safe in the past, and not to risk variance from the norms …
- … while ever-smaller deviations from the norm are becoming detectable.
This road leads to gray, totalitarian-like conformity. Fortunately, there’s still also a path to a brighter future.
Related links
- I was making similar points back in 2008 — but I was greatly over-optimistic about the Obama Administration.
- I spelled out some mechanics of privacy-related dangers in January, 2011.
Comments
11 Responses to “Very chilling effects”
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[…] been harping on the grave dangers of surveillance and privacy intrusion. Clearly, something must be done to rein them in. But […]
Hi Curt,
this is a subject I’me very interested in and worried about, so I’ll take the risk to comment and appear to be a political dissenter:
[…]
while ever-smaller deviations from the norm are becoming detectable.
[…]
deviations (will) include the decision of keeping away from some of the monitoring channels (always-on smartphones today, Google-glass-like devices in a few years, GPS tracking of the car and so on) that are common for an individual’s population segment: even deciding to limit the quantity of our personal traces in the digital world is providing a trace about us.
[…]
This road leads to gray, totalitarian-like conformity
[…]
Most people doesn’t realize how strong the push to conformity is but social scientists have provided demonstrations of this for a long time now.
The video below is great to show the phenomenon live: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sno1TpCLj6A the subject tested behaves as if he had stopped to believe to his own eyes.
[…]
there’s still also a path to a brighter future
[…]
I agree: we can still discuss the subject freely so it’s still possible to change how the situation will evolve.
And even in the worst case the history shows that even in totalitarian states it was possible to be a political dissenter and share ideas.
Maybe not as easily and (almost) risk free as it’s today in the western countries, but possible.
[…] capped off a series on privacy and surveillance a few days […]
[…] of the problem is the very chilling effects they can have upon the exercise of day-to-day freedoms. Fortunately, I’m not as alone in […]
[…] to a point, this is reassuring. But it still bodes badly for a future in which there are many more ways surveillance can be used to hurt us than were possible before. Categories: Data warehousing, GIS and geospatial, Liberty and privacy, […]
[…] am always pleased when policy makers recognize that the key issue is chilling effects upon the exercise of ordinary freedoms; the report made that point multiple times, footnoting both Sonia Sotomayor and the 1970s Church […]
[…] crucial point about chilling effects was laid out in two July, 2013 posts, and some public policy recommendations around the […]
[…] The reason, in simplest terms, is that your interests could be held against you. For example, models can estimate your future health, your propensity for risky hobbies, or your likelihood of changing your residence, career, or spouse. Any of these insights could be useful to employers or financial services firms, and not in a way that redounds to your benefit. And if you think enterprises (or governments) would never go that far, please consider an argument from the sequel to my first “chilling effects” post: […]
[…] Very chilling effects, in which I point out how damaging surveillance can be when there’s even a possibility of adverse consequence. […]
[…] As always, I think that the eventual success or failure of surveillance regulation will depend greatly on the extent to which it accounts for chilling effects. The gravity of surveillance’s longer-term dangers is hard to overstate, yet they still seem broadly overlooked. So please allow me to reiterate what I wrote in 2013 — surveillance + analytics can lead to very chilling effects. […]
[…] The dark side of monitoring is surveillance of citizens and the resulting chilling effects. […]