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[bobf <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>]

For those interested in this subject; I thought this short essay was 
informative.  There are many clickable words (links) in the essay when you 
read it from the original source.

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Bruce Schneier
    


Cryptography 

  Schneier on Security

A blog covering security and security technology.

February 27, 2009

Privacy in the Age of Persistence

Note: This isn't the first time I have written about this topic, and it 
surely won't be the last. I think I did a particularly good job summarizing 
the issues this time, which is why I am reprinting it.

Welcome to the future, where everything about you is saved. A future where 
your actions are recorded, your movements are tracked, and your conversations 
are no longer ephemeral. A future brought to you not by some 1984-like 
dystopia, but by the natural tendencies of computers to produce data.

Data is the pollution of the information age. It's a natural byproduct of 
every computer-mediated interaction. It stays around forever, unless it's 
disposed of. It is valuable when reused, but it must be done carefully. 
Otherwise, its after effects are toxic.

And just as 100 years ago people ignored pollution in our rush to build the 
Industrial Age, today we're ignoring data in our rush to build the 
Information Age.

Increasingly, you leave a trail of digital footprints throughout your day. 
Once you walked into a bookstore and bought a book with cash. Now you visit 
Amazon, and all of your browsing and purchases are recorded. You used to buy 
a train ticket with coins; now your electronic fare card is tied to your bank 
account. Your store affinity cards give you discounts; merchants use the data 
on them to reveal detailed purchasing patterns.

Data about you is collected when you make a phone call, send an e-mail 
message, use a credit card, or visit a website. A national ID card card will 
only exacerbate this.

More computerized systems are watching you. Cameras are ubiquitous in some 
cities, and eventually face recognition technology will be able to identify 
individuals. Automatic license plate scanners track vehicles in parking lots 
and cities. Color printers, digital cameras, and some photocopy machines have 
embedded identification codes. Aerial surveillance is used by cities to find 
building permit violators and by marketers to learn about home and garden 
size.

As RFID chips become more common, they'll be tracked, too. Already you can be 
followed by your cell phone, even if you never make a call. This is wholesale 
surveillance; not "follow that car," but "follow every car."

Computers are mediating conversation as well. Face-to-face conversations are 
ephemeral. Years ago, telephone companies might have known who you called and 
how long you talked, but not what you said. Today you chat in e-mail, by text 
message, and on social networking sites. You blog and you Twitter. These 
conversations – with family, friends, and colleagues – can be recorded and 
stored.

It used to be too expensive to save this data, but computer memory is now 
cheaper. Computer processing power is cheaper, too; more data is 
cross-indexed and correlated, and then used for secondary purposes. What was 
once ephemeral is now permanent.

Who collects and uses this data depends on local laws. In the US, 
corporations collect, then buy and sell, much of this information for 
marketing purposes. In Europe, governments collect more of it than 
corporations. On both continents, law enforcement wants access to as much of 
it as possible for both investigation and data mining.

Regardless of country, more organizations are collecting, storing, and 
sharing more of it.

More is coming. Keyboard logging programs and devices can already record 
everything you type; recording everything you say on your cell phone is only 
a few years away.

A "life recorder" you can clip to your lapel that'll record everything you 
see and hear isn't far behind. It'll be sold as a security device, so that no 
one can attack you without being recorded. When that happens, will not 
wearing a life recorder be used as evidence that someone is up to no good, 
just as prosecutors today use the fact that someone left his cell phone at 
home as evidence that he didn't want to be tracked?

You're living in a unique time in history: the technology is here, but it's 
not yet seamless. Identification checks are common, but you still have to 
show your ID. Soon it'll happen automatically, either by remotely querying a 
chip in your wallets or by recognizing your face on camera.

And all those cameras, now visible, will shrink to the point where you won't 
even see them. Ephemeral conversation will all but disappear, and you'll 
think it normal. Already your children live much more of their lives in 
public than you do. Your future has no privacy, not because of some 
police-state governmental tendencies or corporate malfeasance, but because 
computers naturally produce data.

Cardinal Richelieu famously said: "If one would give me six lines written by 
the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him 
hanged." When all your words and actions can be saved for later examination, 
different rules have to apply.

Society works precisely because conversation is ephemeral; because people 
forget, and because people don't have to justify every word they utter.

Conversation is not the same thing as correspondence. Words uttered in haste 
over morning coffee, whether spoken in a coffee shop or thumbed on a 
BlackBerry, are not official correspondence. A data pattern indicating 
"terrorist tendencies" is no substitute for a real investigation. Being 
constantly scrutinized undermines our social norms; furthermore, it's creepy. 
Privacy isn't just about having something to hide; it's a basic right that 
has enormous value to democracy, liberty, and our humanity.

We're not going to stop the march of technology, just as we cannot un-invent 
the automobile or the coal furnace. We spent the industrial age relying on 
fossil fuels that polluted our air and transformed our climate. Now we are 
working to address the consequences. (While still using said fossil fuels, of 
course.) This time around, maybe we can be a little more proactive.

Just as we look back at the beginning of the previous century and shake our 
heads at how people could ignore the pollution they caused, future 
generations will look back at us – living in the early decades of the 
information age – and judge our solutions to the proliferation of data.

We must, all of us together, start discussing this major societal change and 
what it means. And we must work out a way to create a future that our 
grandchildren will be proud of.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/02/privacy_in_the.html