Author and biotechnology expert Lori Andrews was a guest on one of my favorite radio shows last week. Her book, I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy, discusses many of the same things Eli Pariser does, yet she looks at it through the lens of privacy rights. Although her philosophies are a little sensational and extreme, she touched on two things I found very interesting. First, she discusses how information on the web is moving from the public sphere to the private sphere. Her example was Blueservo. Blueservo is a web service where normal citizens can become virtual deputies, and watch webcams of the Texas-Mexico border. If they see illegal immigrants crossing the border, they can report it to the authorities. Andrews says that this act of public work (policing) being done by private citizens will just expand to many more areas such as neighborhood watches.
The second thing that Andrews discusses is how eventually we will lose so much trust in the internet that we will stop using the great things the web does. Everything from credit card companies, employers, schools, and the government now have to ability to make decisions on our lives based on what we do on the internet. If this trend continues to get more invasive, then a point will eventually come that the scale will be tipped and we’ll stop using the web for great things such as crowd funding and medical diagnoses and support. Where do you think this point is?
Mike, this is a great post! I hadn’t heard of this author and the points she raises are fascinating. I’ll let others in the class take a shot at answering your question about where the tipping point is. But I do want to ask you what was the name of the radio show where you heard the author interviewed?
Thanks. The show is called Coast to Coast AM. Unfortunately it has a reputation of being all about UFO’s and aliens, because that is what the host talks about during the week. However, they have an alternate host who takes weekend duty, and he has great discussions and guests who talk about geopolitics, economics, and things such as this as well.
Wow. Private citizens spying on the borders for illegal immigrants. That is intense! Maybe they get a prize money or something if they catch people, or else this seems painfully awful.
However your topic on the decisions being based on what we do on the Internet is very frightening indeed. I think this is what Eli Pariser touched on too, during his ‘Ted’ talk. He mentioned how back in the days, the Internet was expected to be used for ‘great things’, where the web was thought to be a gateway to connect to the world, to introduce new ideas and most importantly to help drive democracy forward. However, with the increase use of personalizing signals, this is backfiring. We are being confined to ourselves and a time has come where every action you make is via the web, which allows the web to know you more than you know yourself. Scary!
Although personalization of the web does seem to be getting out out of control right now, I highly doubt people will lose so much trust in it that they will stop using it for what it is good for. At some point people will figure out ways to be anonymous on the web again and if personalization gets too disturbing perhaps people would start pressuring the government to regulate it in some way that brings back the trust of the people. There are already certain software programs such as Tor that allow you to be anonymous on the web for certain things; maybe there will be more programs like this in the future allowing you to be more anonymous on the web. I wonder what the future of personalization will look like and what role the government will play in it.