The life of PII: Privacy, personalization, and the public debate
Back so soon?
Ok, now a pop quiz. The article is:
- A mess
- A masterpiece
- A sad commentary on the quality of our debates about privacy
The answer is: All of the above. Let me explain.
A mess
Structurally, the piece is a mess. We’re informed at the outset that “Google is” – present tense – “not hiding its revolutionary ambitions” because Larry Page said — past tense, and nearly a decade ago — that eventually the “search function will be included in people’s brains.”
Now, that’s a pretty frightening prospect. World War Z isn’t out until June, and here’s Google already (well, 9 years ago) aiming to mess with our brains. But wait, the implant thing is “just a rhetorical flourish.” (Eric Schmidt was running Google in 2004; maybe Larry was simply bored.)
Don’t breathe too easily, though, because that mere flourish is resurrected (zombie like) four paragraphs later, and becomes a capital threat, the “Great Implant Agenda” (and an “implant future,” and an “implant scenario”). This reversal is justified because, you see, there really is an implant agenda . . . and the implant is already here . . . but it’s not implanted in your brain, it’s been injected into your . . . thyroid? No, it’s been injected into your pocket. (One suspects that Invasion of the Body Snatchers would have struggled at the box office if the invading aliens merely wanted to slip a transistor radio into everyone’s pants.)
My smartphone is an agent of the G.I.A.? Yes, because the real danger of Morozov’s imagined “implant future” isn’t the implant but rather the future. The future that the subtitle urges us to avoid isn’t the one in which Google intends to put a device in (or on, or merely near) your body. It is rather the future in which Google is able to predict the future. And Morozov believes – or would have us believe he believes – that Google has virtually achieved this future today.
“The implant future is already here” because by combining the data from 60 online services (after the January 2012 privacy policy revisions), Google knows more about us, “can make predictions about what we want,” and aims to “relieve us of active decision making.”
Damn! That does sound nefarious. According to Morozov’s dark scenarios, Google might monitor my calendar, check the weather and traffic patterns, and alert me to leave earlier for a cross town meeting. It might even . . . order a car for me. Or, when I’m driving around wearing Google Glass, Google could . . . why, they could link my favorite cat videos to actual cats I see on the streets. I ask you, friends, do you really want to live in a world in which you’ve been robbed of the ability to call your own taxis?
Never mind, resistance is necessary! Google, after all, is “amassing a fleet of self-driving cars” and has inexplicably duped millions into wanting to wear spy cameras on their heads. “If European history teaches us anything,” it’s that when a powerful entity amasses fleets and recruits spies among us, it’s time take up arms. But resistance to Google is “not evenly distributed.” While the US doesn’t dare contemplate meaningful actions (collaborateurs!), we can be thankful for the courage of European regulators. Alert Donald Rumsfeld – Old Europe still has got some bite.
A masterpiece
Rhetorically, the article is a masterpiece, and for many of the moves just noted. Morozov skillfully plucks at physical, political, and historical anxieties, reminds us of the “fundamental value” of privacy, and fashions a resonant – albeit not fully coherent – salvo for his side of the current privacy debate.
A sad commentary
Make no mistake: I too am troubled by the data grabs and murky privacy policies of many online services (and governments!). The use, abuse, and limits of public and private information ought to be the subject of an ongoing discussion. Yet, too often it is the fundamental quality of this debate that I find dismaying. Privacy is pitted against digital services and innovations as if it were a zero-sum game in which one must defeat the other. We speak of Morozov and the ilk as privacy advocates, as if the other side must be made up of privacy’s opponents. Larry Page is all but fitted for jackboots.
We’re warned that collected data might be used to inform personalized and targeted advertising. This is a considered a problem not because the alternative is no advertising (the slots will still be there), nor because anyone genuinely prefers irrelevant ads to relevant ones, nor even because the ads are especially compelling and drive purchases. (See Geoffrey Moore’s succinct judgment, “Personalization is Baldersdash.”) Rather, “targeted advertising” is deployed as a code phrase for “invasion of privacy.”
Evgeny Morozov is a learned and prolific scholar. He’s done time at Stanford and Georgetown, is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and since 2008 has published essays more often than most of us have tweeted. One can assume he knows that an “unflinching defense of privacy as a fundamental human value” is impossible – for the simple reason that we don’t know what “privacy” means, or that it doesn’t mean just one thing.
Daniel J. Solove, one of the leading experts on privacy law, notes, “Most attempts to understand privacy do so by attempting to locate its essence—its core characteristics or the common denominator that links together the various things we classify under the rubric of “privacy.” Privacy, however, is too complex a concept to be reduced to a singular essence.”
Together with Berkeley law professor Paul Schwartz, Solove has proposed a new way of understanding and treating personally identifiable information (PII). Their “PII 2.0”:
- Mediates some of the differences between the US and European treatments of PII (where it is, respectively, typically under- and over-valued);
- Addresses the increasing problem of non- or de-identified personal information that can be “re-identified”
- Operates not according to a hard definition (and subsequent restriction) of PII, but on “a continuum of risk of identification.”
The life of PII
The current debate needs to respect and reflect this “life of PII” – that is, the fact that privacy is a living, dynamic, complex, and potentially self-contradictory concept and practice. Practically, we all make nuanced and over-determined decisions about our private and public lives on a split second basis. What will I post to Facebook but not Twitter? What adjective conveys just enough but not too much about this experience that I want to share online?
Conceptually and legally, the sense, limits and defense of what is private versus public will obviously continue to evolve (as it always has) in the context of technological transformation and innovation – and ever more so now, in an era of unprecedented and accelerating pace of change.
I’m not quite sure what Morozov means when he says that privacy is a “raw material.” But he’s precisely half right after that. We should certainly “cherish” privacy. But it cannot be “preserv[ed] in [its] own right” unless we place it in a formaldehyde solution and display it with the other lifeless artifacts that could not adapt, or were not allowed to.
