Private Means Secret

I'm sure you are quite aware about fervent outcries surrounding privacy on the Internet. Nothing new, really, among the old hands, but some of the people new to virtual reality know no more about their browsers, HTTP, & the rest of cyber-technology than they do about the vehicles they drive, i.e., not much at all. These Newcomers have discovered that their comings&goings can be tracked, in fact, must* be tracked to give them the services they're expecting & they've decided they don't like it. Still, I can't fault them because many of the old hands declaim about the subject as well.

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Why are some people so excited about maintaining their privacy on the Internet? Oh, I know their primal fear, that someone will see what they're doing & use it to hurt them or their families. But how reasonable are their expectations of going places virtual without being seen?

After all, how long have we enjoyed privacy as individuals? Go back far enough & nobody even wanted privacy. Living alone often meant not living at all. One of our greatest discoveries is society, first as families, then as tribes, then as cities, & finally, nations. We got together & accomplished much bigger things than we could have alone. From cave to small town, we shared our lives with other people, and those people who went off by themselves, like shamans or hermits, were considered weird. Even large cities, with all the anonymity ascribed to them, did no more than pack lots of small towns together. Try living in a third-floor walk-up in the Bronx & see just how private your life really is.

Are we evolving to another form of society beyond nation-states? Topic for another homily.

Only with the post-WWII invention of the suburb did we start getting the idea we could restrict access to some parts of our lives. Given the following:

some distance between houses
the scattering of family members to various destinations facilitated by the ubiquitous automobile
the increasing amount life spent encapsulated in that car as we moved among those destinations
the escape provided by TV (just another form of cyberspace)

we have come to believe that we could keep our "lives of quiet desperation" to ourselves.

But why? Secrets, of course. Now hold on: I know people didn't wait till we had suburbs to invent shameful behaviors that they wanted to hide. Nope, we've been misbehavin' (probably) ever since behavin' itself was established by a larger society. We just snuck around to other places to keep certain folks (parents, wife, police) from knowing what we were doing, essentially trading one set of people "in the know" for another. However, in suburbs, people, even teenagers & smaller children, came to possess exclusively a specific square footage. They closed doors, they drew blinds, they shut out the rest of the world — except for 1 or more "secret pals" — & went about doing things they didn't want other people to know about.

I'll take this time to bring in another topic loaded high with insistence these days: personal responsibility. Many people try to blame others for their mistakes. Many of those others persist in letting them. Still others cry out that's wrong & try to bring the fickle finger of blame back around to the original culprits. They're all trying to keep their "ownership" of certain behaviors on one side of the secrecy line or the other, hence the connection to privacy.

What's that connection? If people truly owned their behavior — & the thoughts behind it — they wouldn't need secrecy. During the founding of Yeibichai, the planet where my novel Seeds of Disaster takes place, they set up a language of behavior patterns for everyone to follow. In the "Open and Accountable" Pattern, the Founders wrote:

The Planetary Collective, hence society, demands complete openness and accountability for all zhee-tely [citizens] in all activities. Therefore, all public spaces, on land and sea and in the air, are automatically observed (Beobachtung) and all raw surveillance data, and the tools to process it, made available via the Mirnaya Direvnya [their Internet or World-Wide Web]. Any zhee-tel may access the data and tools, including the anshin.

Pattern Languages were developed by Christopher Alexander and his crew at the Center for Environmental Structure, as explained in their wonderful books -- A Timeless Way of Building, A Pattern Language, and The Oregon Experiment [New York: Oxford University Press, 1977]

Everything that happens in any public spaces, the whole Great Outdoors, is recorded & it's all available to everybody. They also record the way people look at the recordings. Guess what that does to the crime rate? Right! If people have secrets — & they do; just ask Dain — they keep them to themselves & they don't bother other people.

To support my point, I'll quote David Coursey, Executive Editor, AnchorDesk, in his article about pop-up ads (don't block them) and targeted advertising (he loves it), titled "Pop-up ads are driving me nuts! How about you?" He says, "[Targeted advertising] IS A WONDERFUL FEATURE that has shown me books and music I never would have found otherwise.... If only all Web sites were so predictive, while still offering me items outside my narrow interests and expanding my horizons. And if that takes tracking and analyzing what I do online, even across multiple sites, that's way cool by me. I understand some people are concerned about the privacy aspects of this, but so long as nothing bad happens to me as a result of such data collection, it seems like a big win."

Turning to the current news, I see that "Open and Accountable" is making progress within these United State of America.

According to TIME (June 11, 2001, issue, though their web-site doesn't carry the story anymore), Texas state District Judge J. Manuel Bañales ordered sex offenders on probation to post signs in their yards that a "Registered Sex Offender Lives Here."

According to Associated Press, on July 1, 2001, "Tampa is using high-tech security cameras to scan the city's streets for people wanted for crimes ..." Using technology from Visionics Corporation unveiled during Super Bowl 2001, the city's automata is matching people frequenting the night-life district named Ybor City against a "database of mug shots of people with outstanding arrest warrants."

So, instead of pushing for greater privacy in this world of expanding communication, we should be campaigning for less. Arise, citizens! Let it all hang out! All you've got to lose are your chains!

Keywords: stateless, privacy, Internet, secrets, personal responsibility, suburban sprawl, post-WWII society, pattern language, Center for Environmental Structure, Christopher Alexander, A Timeless Way of Building, open and accountable, David Coursey, AnchorDesk, targeted advertising, pop-up ads, security cameras in Tampa, Visionics Corporation, Judge J. Manuel Bañales

*By technical definition, a web-page is "stateless," that is, it doesn't know whether you've looked at it before, even if it's just been a second, or whether you've looked at related pages. For a web-site to keep track of you and your preferences, let you log in, know if you've ever logged in before, drop things into a "shopping basket," and so on, all the stuff we like to use on web-sites, it's got to record that data somewhere. So, the programmers use cookies — which means you carry your history around with you — or it's a backend database — which means some other computer is "remembering" all you did — or some other way to preserve state. To get any real use out of the Internet, you've got to give up some privacy. Get over it.