Big Bro Wants to Sell You Something

Scott Berinato writes in CIO:

In 1984, the state methodically stripped the population of privacy and individual identity. This Orwell got wrong. In 2003, it’s largely corporations doing it. (Give the state time, though. The Total Information Awareness effort within the Department of Homeland Security, and aspects of the USA Patriot Act, such as the one that threatens to cut funding if schools don’t turn over personal information about students for military recruiting purposes, has renewed with terrific vigor the use of the term Orwellian). Big Brother turned out not to be a totalitarian regime hell-bent on absolute power, but rather a matrix of capitalist regimes addicted to money. Still, the effect is largely the same – far less individual privacy.

….we are not horrified by the many ways in which his dark prophecy has come true. What used to be sinister and abhorrent now appears in a constant stream of sunny, putative (newspeak follows) “value propositions.” Yes, we’re taking away privacy, the argument goes, but you get something good in return. Constant surveillance will help us root out terrorists; personal data for warranties allows a bike company to better understand our needs; the grocery store can give us better coupons!

One can always find a few good applications for which degrading privacy seems acceptable – like putting GPS in cell phones so 911 services know where we are in an emergency. But when have corporate regimes ever disciplined themselves to keep the baby and throw out the bathwater? Once the GPS locator is soldered into the phone, localized spam (“Eat at Joe’s, two doors down from where you are now!”) is destined to follow.

….If anything, the slow erosion of privacy, the way it has been beaten back by the waves, almost imperceptibly, over generations, is the reason we haven’t been vigilant about protecting privacy. But one day – soon, it seems – we’ll look up and realize the beach is nearly gone.