IS PRIVACY DEAD?
Privacy is disappearing faster than we realize … and the coronavirus isn’t helping.
STORY BY SA M A N T HA WOHL F EI L , I L LU STR ATI O N S BY J E F F DR E W
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ure, you lock your home, and you probably don’t share your deepest secrets with random strangers. And if someone knocked on your door and asked to know when you last got your period, you’d tell them to get lost. Yet, as a smartphone user, you’re likely sharing highly personal information with total strangers every minute – strangers whose main focus is to convert every element of your personality into money. Click here. Vote for this candidate. Open this app again. Watch this ad. Buy this product. We’ve been giving out our private information in order to use convenient, fun and largely free apps, and we’re only now understanding the true costs. Would you mind if an app that you specifically told not to use your location tracked your real-time movements anyway by pinging off nearby Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signals? What if the mobile therapy app you use to get counseling told Facebook whenever you’re in a session and, without using your name, told an advertising firm the last time you felt suicidal? Or, what if there was a global pandemic, and a company you’d never
heard of revealed a map of cellphone locations showing that you hadn’t been doing your part to stay away from others and slow the spread of the deadly virus? Could that become enforceable? Could you be fined? Publicly shamed? While most Americans say they’re concerned about how companies and the government use their data, Pew Research shows they also largely feel they have little to no control over the data that companies and the government collect about them. Tech companies often defend data collection, noting they remove users’ names to “depersonalize” the information. But privacy experts say that’s pretty much bullshit: Location data without a name can easily be pinned to an individual when you see that pin travel between a workplace and a home address. And even if your internet activity is shared under a unique number instead of your name, the goal is to intimately understand exactly who you are, what you like and what you’ll pay for. The good news is, privacy advocates say that we can avoid a dystopian future where nothing is private. But to get there will take understanding the many ways that data and technology are
already used to violate privacy and civil rights, and willpower among lawmakers to pass strong legislation that ensures actual consent to how our information is used, and penalties for those who abuse our trust. People also need to decide if the risks outweigh the perks. “People don’t like it – they don’t like being known unless they’ve asked to be known,” says Jennifer King, director of privacy at Stanford University’s Center on Internet and Society. “Companies are banking on the fact that if they keep pushing us towards that world, we’ll just say, ‘Yeah, it is really convenient.’”
FIRST OF ALL, WE’RE BEING TRACKED
At this point in the digital age, many Americans realize they’re being tracked in one way or another, whether by companies or governments, even if they don’t know just how detailed that tracking is. Seven years ago, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the United States of America doesn’t just spy on the rest of the world, but also tracks its own citizens through the National Security Agency, which maps cellphone locations, reads people’s
emails and monitors internet activities. Then, about two years ago, former employees of tech company Cambridge Analytica revealed to lawmakers in the U.S. how they used Facebook surveys to secure thousands of data points about every American voter. Even voters who hadn’t signed up for the personality tests were captured in the scraped data, which was used to create highly targeted ads for “persuadable” voters to help Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The company focused specifically on flipping persuadable voters in certain precincts, which then helped flip a few key states in his favor, as detailed in the documentary The Great Hack. Now, as contact-tracing efforts are becoming widespread for novel coronavirus COVID-19, the world has gotten its latest reminder that many companies far less recognizable than Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook or Microsoft are purchasing and using your location data all the time. With much of the world sheltering in place for weeks in an effort to slow the spread of the deadly virus, people quickly turned their attention to places that weren’t taking aggresCONTINUED ON PAGE 15
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ORLANDO WEEKLY ● MAY 6-12, 2020 ● orlandoweekly.com
