AMU Cyber & AI Defense Homeland Security Opinion Privacy

The Price of Privacy and Social Mobility

By Brett Daniel Shehadey
Special Correspondent for In Homeland Security

In the near future, most people’s lives will exist on third-party servers and float around in cyberspace often for sale or public view. Even now, businesses’ and individuals’ information are stored and or displayed on iCloud, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Gmail, Outlook, Instagram, SIRI, Cortana and many others. At this point in time, it is possible to exist without them, but in the future, services and programs that demand more privacy, habits and preferences will be required.

In the future, almost everyone’s psychological profiles, their identities, lifestyles, personal views, opinions, reactions, affiliations, pictures, emails, documents and other activities will be stored on computers they do not control (i.e., third party operated clouds). A far greater amount than people are willing to give now will be mandatory in that future. The concept of personal privacy is right now being altered and stripped down through a natural process of privacy erosion and intrusion independent of any government invasion or abuse and pushed by institutions that benefit from social media or selling private information to others. The process is fueled by better technology and hope.

As for the very few of us who might refuse to participate in the migration of the human race to the cloud, they will increasingly be left behind. Greater access to paid and free services will require more and more personal information. Some of this private information will be the usual (name, address, email) but birth dates and preferences will become more and more demanding. Even governments are and will demand more and more personal information that they never asked before. There is also, it seems, a need that goes beyond an increased willingness to share more and more information with the younger generations.

People will have to reveal more and more of themselves to download almost every new app, program, make any Internet purchase or find any service. Those that refuse to divulge details of themselves in exchange for goods or services or allow the company the ability to use your private information how they deem fit will not be able to use the apps, services or make less and less purchases better priced than traditional sells. Those people will not be welcomed in the new era. They will fall through the cracks, fail to find jobs, drop out of school as conscientious or religious observers, etc. If these numbers become substantial enough, technologies addressing the need for native storage personal clouds and personal AI assistants will become popular but even that will not turn the tide against outside privacy intrusions

The readers might think, this sounds a lot like something that could have been prophetically written for society a long time ago, as it applies to them today. They would probably be right in in their case. Nevertheless, there are still a large number of people that are trying to hold on to what little privacy they have left while others pledge allegiance to uploading themselves online with little or no questions asked. The best the rest of us can do is stall but you will win in the end. Institutions defeat the individual through a sort of bribery of more convenience in exchange for privacy. A lot of these apps and programs are free and written by complete unknown strangers. While they are filtered by the companies like Apple or Google that screen them, this does not make the creators of these programs safe. Many of them are overseas. Some of them are hackers.

Could there be a compromise in this trend to protect privacy and get better programs? Yes, of course. But the people are willing to lose privacy and the companies do not want this. Specifically, more people are pushing for technology and social digital integration than they are pushing against it. Providers (companies) are unwilling to turn from the pursuit of greater knowledge and insight of their customers or “sources” of information they can sell. Effectively, they increasingly gain information power over them as well as setting a trend that the institutions set the rules, not the “customers.” The information is given up. The company will be able in most cases to retain it forever. Authorities (governments) are unwilling to endorse greater safe-guards on the general population for the security benefits the clouds and social media bring. They are afraid to upset the providers who continue fast-paced breakthroughs, greater industrial efficiencies and intelligent machines into our lives.

It is not all bad. That is, as our lives go more and more online and into the futuristic abyss of the Internet of things (IoT) we find ourselves no more vulnerable than before at this point. The future can go either way. This can harm the public but it can also benefit society greatly. Hackers are one example. We have already seen political targeting (e.g., Internal Revenue Service officials against conservatives). We have not seen or experienced government intrusion to the extent that is possible. The biggest worry will be with foreign governments which are far behind the U.S. and other developed states in the cloud era now but will not be in the upcoming IoT era. Places like China can expect to be even worse as an authoritarian state cracks down on political dissidents, personal lives and activities through Weibo, Alibaba and others. This will go far beyond the Golden Shield that exists now and can be bypassed using programs like Freegate, Ultrasurf and Psiphon. Can you say “cyber thought police?”

The one hope to avoid extreme dystopian cyber enslavement is the exposure of all, including public officials’’ lives. In this atmosphere, compete exposure is the only safety for the people under tyranny or the advantage of another a competing government. Intelligence services would do well to prepare to be instituted for mass dissemination of foreign leader’s dirty laundries. If they do it now, it might increase 10,000 fold. So common in the future and so far beyond posting to sites life to any single WikiLeaks site but will create actual news services and or existing news services that distribute it regularly or have a place for it. Such sites like WikiLeaks become stained with the focus on states far less abusive than others and or become tools of foreign powers.

In the distant future it will not be possible to hide behind privacy intrusions because the information will be mandated as well as the social norm. How does a country maintain a semblance of utopia with privacy intrusion?

While all privacy in a liberal society should be protected; especially under the Fourth Amendment and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, at the very least, the protection of financial corporate and personal financial identities must be guaranteed if nothing else is. The right of people to feel secure in their financial affairs, if infringed will be seen like wildfire all over and riots and discontent would soon follow.

A distinction should be made here between invasion of privacy and intrusion of privacy. Invasion of privacy is always illegal [for governments without reasonable cause] while intrusion of privacy is a matter of willing, even begrudgingly, overturning your personal information to others, like Google. This means that you should have all the rights while information is stored in your home only but whenever outside the home, the right to the information is increasing in the public domain. No matter how much the information is encrypted here, it is exposed. No matter what privacy policies you were coerced to accept in order to use the service that everyone else is using, the institution and you have “agreed” to hold them less responsible with your privacy than they should be. With email, by law, after a while, the information effectively becomes abandoned property.

Such orphaned e-letters are now considered legally as belonging to no one, even though you technically hold a copyright as author of the letter. In comparison, a starch departure from snail mail, where it is crime to intentionally open mail when not addressed to you. Meanwhile email can be opened after just 180 days (when sitting on a third party server) whether it has been opened or not. Yielding to privacy policy contracts dictate the rest of our information online’s fate but the future is trading privacy for security and for progress.

Society’s gain is not the individual’s total loss: They will be able to obtain the latest mobile technologies, services and networks they will need for work or pleasure, but they will have less choice if they want to live within the techno-social world around them.

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