Privacy on the same road to extinction as Wild West

Privacy on the same road to extinction as Wild West
By Jack Fuller a former editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune
Published August 18, 2006

A hijack attempt foiled. Authorities surely had monitored the suspects' behavior on the Web. Laptops were seized, Internet cafes given a good going over. Worries about privacy vanished, smothered in relief.

Privacy as we once knew it is gone and won't come back. It vanished the way America's western frontier did almost 120 years ago--the result of countless individual decisions as much as by government action.

The passing of the western frontier would have gone largely unnoticed if historian Frederick Jackson Turner hadn't written an influential work suggesting that with the frontier's closing, a wellspring of American individualism had dried up.

He overestimated the consequences. A combination of rapid, easy mobility (cars and airplanes replacing covered wagons) and the great migration to impersonal cities became a substitute for lighting out for virgin territories as America's safety valve.

But this refuge of anonymity in movement and the crowd has increasingly become an illusion.

Strangely enough, the Internet, which has made it possible for people to isolate themselves in a cocoon of their own individual interests and prejudices, has also been the means by which most of us have opened our innermost lives to people not even known to us. It is not as if anyone made us do this. We have simply spent our privacy in pursuit of other things we want.

That was true of the closing of the western frontier as well. It wasn't only the pioneers and troublemakers and opportunists and malcontents who actually went west who benefited. So did everyone who worked for the railroads that stretched out to them. Or ate the beef and grain they produced. Or wore or hoarded the gold. Or built with the timber.

For me, the tolling of the privacy frontier came when Amazon.com began recommending to me books, movies and music that I was actually interested in. Not that I dislike this service. It is really quite convenient. But Amazon knows my mind better than any but a few intimate friends.

As recently as a decade ago, it would have been inconceivable that a corporation could accomplish such a mind-reading feat.

It wasn't too long ago that anyone who feared that the telephone company was Big Brother seemed a little off. I used to laugh when friends in the late '60s worried that their phones were being tapped. Today it does not take a paranoid to imagine that someone is with you on the line. Computers have vastly increased the amount of data they can handle. Information science has developed powerful new ways of sorting this data on the fly. Now it really is possible to monitor nearly everything.

The import of this registers in the public imagination when a database falls into the wrong hands. Somebody steals a laptop onto which a government employee has innocently copied the names, addresses and Social Security numbers of countless veterans. A tape containing millions of credit card records goes missing. Or a newspaper manages to use a database available to the public to figure out everything a 62-year-old Georgia widow asked about on the Internet--from bipolar disorder to singles dances to termites.

In addition, whenever the immediacy of the possibility of a terrorist strike fades, concern about government programs to monitor communications and behavior of individuals increases.

Something must be done, right? Well, yes and no. For the most part, just as with the closing of the western frontier, there is no going back.

Certainly procedures should be established to have independent, disinterested institutions approve or disapprove government monitoring of individual behavior. Courts have traditionally served this purpose; new mechanisms could be invented for the task.

But should government monitoring be shut down or drastically curtailed? Not unless we are prepared to risk airplanes blown out of the sky, trains exploding and all manner of other horror known only to the fevered imagination of the world's terrorists. The ability of individuals and small groups to wreak enormous violence has made our previous expectations of anonymity and privacy simply too dangerous.

When public safety is not at issue, regulation carries smaller risks. Carnegie Mellon University's M. Granger Morgan and Elaine Newton proposed a thoughtful list of measures that if applied to databases concerning individuals could preserve some breathing space for privacy and even anonymity. It includes things like using distributed rather than centralized systems for storing information, avoiding making information available to system users in real time and purging data as often as possible.

But unless we are prepared for an economy that slows down to the speed of a typewriter and the Postal Service, we had better be careful how we regulate.

Not to mention the danger of sacrificing the ability to find out in seconds how much a new trombone might cost or to study a set of three-dimensional cross sections of the human brain or to practice recognizing the difference between the musical interval of a perfect 4th and a minor 3rd. Just to pick a few examples from the database located in my head--and probably quite a few other places as well.