With the increasingly intrusive Internet pervading our lives, I at least am developing a feeling that my privacy has diminished considerably over the years. Sure, I freely choose to write this blog and send it out, with my name on it, to anyone with Internet access to read. But with the technology as developed as it is, just about any "click" I make on the computer over the Web is traceable back to me and can be used to create a profile, at least one regarding the collective use of my computer (which my whole family uses at various times). I wonder whether everyone else really understands how little privacy they have on the Internet? But this loss of privacy, I believe, is quite different in nature than, say, someone sneaking a peak into your house or listening to your phone conversations.
We may all be leaving bits of information in our wake as we wander through the Internet, but this is all being done simultaneously worldwide on such a massive scale that the information we unwittingly spread around about ourselves only reaches anyone's attention after much filtering. The nightmare scenario I see in this is in the future, when someone may be applying for a job and is confronted with his/her record in Internet usage. Hopefully, our elected politicians and our judges will be attentive to this and prevent it from happening through protective laws. But I wouldn't count on it.
I know an elderly gentleman (in his eighties) who was so concerned about his lack of privacy that he had his television cable service ended after he found out that the cable companies could tell which channel he was watching (using sweep analyzers). I tried to tell him that the cable company was only trying to catch those who were stealing cable service and couldn't care less what channel he was watching, but the fear persisted with him nevertheless.
Which brings me to the point of this article. In an individual's life, what is worse: being disregarded and ignored as a nobody, or knowing that some people out there are prying into your personal life? My answer, which is becoming increasingly clear to me as I age, is the former.
Information is so dispersed in our society nowadays that anyone clamoring to be seen or heard and go to extreme lengths to accomplish this and still be generally ignored. And that includes the more talented writers, artists, and scholars. Not only is this so for the living, but the greats of the past are sinking progressively deeper into the chasms of obscurity. The fact that their books and music still adorn the shelves of stores means little; there is so much to choose to pay attention to that they are also left behind in the collective mass of material.
Isaac Asimov, a very extroverted soul who never had a problem against promoting himself, wrote five hundred books in his lifetime, until his death in 1992. Now, seventeen years later, I rarely can find more than just a handful of books by him in bookstores. He is just one example of how quickly one's legacy can diminish over a very short time. Yet we are also living in a time when his works are preserved and available to the (fewer and fewer) people who want to read them!
So what legacy do I want to have? Do I want to be so invisible throughout the one life I have that no one other than my immediate family and acquaintances is even aware of my passing when I do die? Or should I realize that I might as well just go all out and make a damned public fool of myself, since no one (except possibly those same family members and acquaintances) could really care less anyway? And leave behind a relatively permanent (though probably unexamined) record of my writings and other creative output? Well, I think I've already answered my own questions with this blog. And this is just the beginning!
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«someone sneaking a peak into your house»Seems hard to "sneak", there; I think I should notice if someone tried to deposit a mountain my living room. It'd likely block the view.
ReplyDeleteMore seriously and less homophonically:
«We may all be leaving bits of information in our wake as we wander through the Internet, but this is all being done simultaneously worldwide on such a massive scale that the information we unwittingly spread around about ourselves only reaches anyone's attention after much filtering.»Yes, and in the days when that information was ephemeral, thinking about being lost in the flood of data was more of a comfort. Now, though, with denser and cheaper storage, it can be kept for a long time — essentially forever.
The process of sifting through such information is called "data mining", and with more storage, faster processors, and better mining techniques, the existence of those bits of information we leave in our wakes is more troublesome.
It's no longer just the case that Bill Irwin comes to the attention of someone, information for the last few weeks or months is searched, and references to Bill are plucked out.
Now, there's years of information, and it's correlated in myriad ways. Information that never was explicitly attached to Bill before can be connected to you now, through data-mining techniques. Worse, someone can just decide to see who's been "doing things related to terrorism", whatever that means, and the data mining can surface some Internet searches you did, web sites you visited, email you received, and so on. No one was looking for you, but they found you anyway.
As to your conclusion, though, I agree with you. I've made it my career to try to make a difference to the world by working in the small area where I can: Internet technology and standards. I think I've made a little bit of a difference, and I aim to continue. I also aim to try to sway at least a few minds with what I write.
We do what we can.
"sneaking a peak into your house": Yeh, that spell-check just doesn't filter out words that are spelled "correctly" but don't fit the text! On the other hand, there are some religious folk out there who think they can "move mountains"....or maybe Richard Dreyfuss is at it again (see Close Encounters of the Third Kind)!
ReplyDeleteDoubtless you're correct about the increasing degree of sophistication with extracting and refining bits of information and tagging it to people for later possible retrieval, after an indefinite period of time with no "sunset" date for the personal information. (It's really late at night, I'm tired, and I hope that what I just wrote makes sense!)
Oh, it was very kind of you to "overlook" the screwed-up title to this article. I changed it to something that is, I think, a little more accurate (and better spelled).