[Part I is available below.]

Imagine yourself in an urban home circa 1900: it’s summer, and the windows are open wide to admit the breeze.  There’s no air conditioner or refrigerator humming in the kitchen, and very few cars passing outside.  There’s no television or radio blaring in the next room, and rarely even a phonograph.  In other words, it’s quiet.  The only sounds are the occasional horse’s hooves on the road, and human voices.

Sitting in your living room next to the open window, you can smell what your neighbours are cooking for dinner.  You know which of your neighbours likes to listen to Faure and which likes Copland.  You learn which of your neighbours is cheating on a spouse, or which has an ailing parent, or which beats their children.  Intimate details of their lives, from the mundane to the scandalous, are passed through their open windows.

Over time, we invented climate control, and closed our sashes, curtains and blinds.  We invented TV, and migrated away from our porches and windows.  And we developed cars.  Cars led to the logical extension of our self-imposed cloistering: contemporary suburbia, where row upon row of garage doors face the street, but windows are hidden and there are no passers-by, so even sidewalks have atrophied away.  These homes are designed to block out the rest of the world, as if the people in them have no interest in what goes on outside.

But paradoxically, even though the modern home is designed to shut out the external world, it simultaneously brings the external world inside.  Telephone lines, satellite TV and cable Internet converge in the living room.  The two-way flow of information — where your neighbours know as much about you as you know about them — has been replaced by a one-way flow of information, where your cloistered home life is kept secret, while all the information the media have to offer flows in.

Of course, this is illusory.  We like to think that information flow in our homes is unidirectional — and we’re right, but more often than not it flows in the opposite direction, at least as concerns personal and private information.  If you’re using a PVR, the TV shows you watch are being monitored.  If you subscribe to a magazine or newspaper, your subscription is kept in a database.  The phone company has records of every call you place or receive.  And every website you visit, every article you read, and every online purchase you make is monitored by the proprietors of the websites you visit, and some you don’t.

Should you panic?  Is Big Brother’s malevolent eye fixed on your filthy porn-hunting habits?  There’s a certain sense of safety when the flow of private information is bidirectional; in bidirectional information flow, your neighbours may know whom you’ve been inviting as overnight guests, but these are neighbours you know — you know whom they are and what they do as well.  Sure, your privacy is compromised, but there’s a certain leverage that comes from knowing as much about your neighbours as they know about you — not to mention a degree of trust that your neighbours won’t abuse the information they have about you.  But when information is unidirectional, it’s natural to fear the consequences.  Natural, but not necessarily logical.  Whether or not we should fear a unidirectional flow of information comes down to just who has this information and what they’re going to do with it.

There are really two main reasons institutions gather information about our media consumption habits and online activities.  There’s the issue of national security — monitoring behaviour in search of suspicious habits that might suggest plans that threaten the safety of others.  While this is a legitimate concern, it’s important to remember the limitations of this power.  ECHELON captures phone conversations and Emails in the US, the UK and the colonies, which are analysed in an effort to distill intelligence in the form of “chatter,” but this doesn’t extend to the existence a file with your name on it somewhere, counting the number of times you’ve used the word “fertilizer” in phone conversations over the last year.  While monitoring private communications is potentially both a useful tool and an invasion of personal privacy, everyone involved knows that terrorists don’t actually plan their attacks using Email or cellphones.  While the potential for abuse at the hands of sinister cabals does exist, what the government can accomplish by spying on private citizens’ communication is ultimately rather limited.

The other reason institutions gather information on our media consumption habits and online activities is for marketing purposes.  And while the knee-jerk reaction to this might be more paranoia, I think it pays to consider why marketers want to collect so much information about us.  Sure, it allows them to market more effectively, but it also allows them to market more efficiently.  When you consider what this means for you, at the receiving end of advertising, it becomes clear that it’s a win-win situation.

How many car ads have you sat through, with no plans of buying a car?  How many tampon or mascara ads, for you men, or for you women, how many ads for men’s deodorant or razors?  How hours have the childless among us wasted watching diaper ads?  How many ads for flooded basement or roof repairs have the apartment-dwellers out there watched?  And how many yogurt ads have the lactose-intolerant had to endure?  I, for one, would happily turn over my SIN and credit cards number to anyone promising I’ll never have to hear the Marine Land song again.  You get my point.  Inefficiency in advertising is a burden not only to advertisers, who might spend money to advertise to a thousand people just to reach the one who’s in the market for their product, but also to the viewers, who have to sit through ads that don’t pertain to them.

I plan on writing more about this in the future, but suffice to say there’s a lot of potential to make advertising more rewarding for everyone involved, but it depends on extremely targeted advertising, and the only way to accomplish that is by gathering lots of data on the viewer in question.  Is there potential for abuse of these data?  It’s really hard for me to imagine a scenario in which these data are used for anything more sinister than advertising, but even within the constraints of advertising (particularly social advertising), there are opportunities for problems to arise.

Take, for example, the system introduced by Facebook, which launched before all the kinks had quite been worked out.  Called Beacon, when it originally launched, it actually followed Facebook users to different websites after they left the Facebook page and posted their activities back on Facebook.  For example, if you played around on Facebook for a while, then went over to Amazon.com without logging out of Facebook first, and decided to buy Positive: Living with HIV / AIDS — and you missed the little pop-up letting you opt-out of Beacon’s alerts on this specific item — a notification would appear on your Facebook profile saying “John Doe just bought Positive: Living with HIV / AIDS at Amazon.com!”  The fallout from this could be as benign as ruining the surprise of someone’s birthday gift or as severe as being fired from work, ostracized by friends and banished from church or family.

Which brings me back to the point: it is not prudent to consider any activity performed online “private.”  Even though you may be sitting in your bedroom in your ratty undies, your online activities are taking place in the public sphere.  If you walk into a pornography shop on a busy street, you do it with the awareness that you just might run into your aunt or pastor as you walk out with a brown paper bag under your arm.  There’s a sense that the consumption of pornography in one’s private space — such as one’s domicile — will remain private, but it’s important to remember that the Internet is always public, and someone, somewhere, just might be monitoring which porno websites you visit.  And just like you’d steer clear of the porno shop if you weren’t willing to accept the risk of bumping into an acquaintance there, you should steer clear of porno websites if you’re not prepared to accept the risk of your digital footprint leading people back to your patronage of them.  Fortunately, the odds of anyone caring are very slim.

If determining which activities performed in public space should be protected as private is often muddy, the same cannot be said of activities performed in cyberspace.  The ability to hide behind online anonymity is liberating, but only by approaching one’s online activities with the mindset that everything online is performed in public can one be sure to avoid the problems that result from a false sense of privacy.  Online activities will always result in a digital footprint; it’s not quite as dramatic as being caught purchasing porno in flagrante delicto — but it’s more insidious.  If you make it out of the porno shop without getting caught, you’re home free … but online, the traces of your activities last potentially forever; a record may be stored in the databases of the websites you visit, and on your own computer.

The point of all this is not to stoke paranoia — just the opposite.  All these problems become moot if we exercise prudence; if we all comport ourselves online as if we are operating in the public sphere (which we are), then protecting privacy online becomes a non-issue.  To try to block the aggregation of user info online is futile.  To try to legislate privacy online would lead to crushing bureaucracy.  To censor ourselves, on the other hand, is simply sensible.  There is lots of information we can turn over to marketers without hesitation: our age and gender, our favourite films, or music — and this is the information that marketers actually want anyway.  It behooves us all to give up this harmless info in the name of efficient advertising, while guarding our private information through judicious conduct online.

But that’s not enough.  While I personally believe that corporations have nothing more sinister in mind than better marketing, the fact remains that the potential for abuse still exists no matter how sagaciously we navigate the Internet.  Information grants power, and even if it’s nothing more than the power to advertise the hell out of something, it’s not a power we should turn over without expecting something in return.  I do not believe it is possible or beneficial to attempt to prevent companies from accessing or collecting or even sharing data about our online perambulations, but the rules that guideline how they can access or collect or share our data must be carefully written.  And even then, it’s not enough to simply legislate how data can be used — we also need to engineer both accountability and transparency into the process.  We must have information about what the data are used for in order to make informed decisions about what kind of exposure we want to allow ourselves, and we must have information about how the data are collected in order to make informed decisions about how to avoid unwanted exposure.

As long as we know the terms on which our data are being used, I think we can allow that information to be spread around without trepidation.  And why shouldn’t we?  The flow of personal data coming from consumers of media will always be unidirectional, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s coming at a cost to those consumers.  But we need to have some control over the corporate exploitation of our data, even if it’s only the control we gain through the awareness of how to avoid this exploitation wish it.

[Jump to Part III.]