Lure of technological convenience hides a nasty side
There is no denying the fact that we all love our tech toys. Apple’s iPhone continues to sell, smart phones in general grow in popularity, GPS-based apps are just handy to have. Things like electronic swipe cards for subways, toll booths and quick payment at stores make life easier – and quicker. God knows I wouldn’t know what to do without my debit card – I hardly ever carry cash anymore.
The dark side to this though is that every time we use those ‘conveniences’ that data is collected and kept somewhere. Under the guise of aggregated data used for everything from profit projections to traffic flows this data is amassed painting a picture of where you have been and what you have done.
This collection of data has many privacy experts concerned as we are seeing cases of this type of data turning up in courtrooms. Whether it be the police using cell phone records to track people to things like E-ZPasses to show people’s travel routes at the times when crimes have occurred. Google searches have shown up in more than a few high profile murder trials.
As Adam Cohen notes in an editorial post at The New York Times this isn’t just the prevue of the police and lawyers.
Corporations and the government can keep track of what political meetings people attend, what bars and clubs they go to, whose homes they visit. It is the fact that people’s locations are being recorded “pervasively, silently, and cheaply that we’re worried about,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a recent report.
Sure we might realize empirically that we are probably being watched by an increasing number of CCTV cameras as we move around but in general people don’t realize the extent to which their everyday activity is recorded. People aren’t told that using that transportation card will also allow the transportation authority to track them (or that police have used those records in criminal investigations). Cell phone users aren’t told that even though they aren’t using the phone that if it is turned the companies can track their movements.
Not all of this information is being broadcasted and collected without our knowledge as the popularity of social media services like BrightKite which is a web service that let’s you broadcast your current location and the willingness of people to tell the world where and what they are doing. Sure the typical argument that advocates of these types of services, knowing or otherwise, is that if we have nothing to hide we shouldn’t be concerned about all this data collected.
Sorry but that’s a mug’s argument in my opinion. I can understand how some of this data can be helpful but in no way does it need any type of personal information attached to it. As Cohen points out in his editorial
As much as possible, location-specific information should not be collected in the first place, or not in personally identifiable form. There are many ways, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes, to use cryptography and anonymization to protect locational privacy. To tell you about nearby coffee shops, a cellphone application needs to know where you are. It does not need to know who you are.
When locational information is collected, people should be given advance notice and a chance to opt out. Data should be erased as soon as its main purpose is met. After you pay your E-ZPass bill, there is no reason for the government to keep records of your travel.
While the lure of convenience is making this kind of data collection palatable that doesn’t mean that it is a good thing or that it should be being done.
