Disorientation?

I’ve always been concerned about the impact that technology, particularly the convergence of Internet technologies and mobile telephony is going to have on our privacy. So reading this did not help at all - the Database of Intentions formulated by the author is almost sinister in what it could know of us!

Read this excerpt, and if it interests you, go pick up the book. Strand Bookstall has a good deal going on it, fyi.

Excerpt - The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, by John Battelle.

Search straddles an increasingly complicated territory of marketing, media, technology, pop culture, international law, and civil liberties. It is fraught not only with staggering technological obstacles imagine the data created by billions of queries each week but with nearly paralyzing social responsibility. If Google and companies like it know what the world wants, powerful organizations become quite interested in them, and vulnerable individuals see them as a threat. Etched into the silicon of Google’s more than 150,000 servers, more likely than not, are the agonized clickstreams of a gay man with AIDS, the silent intentions of a would-be bomb maker, the digital bread crumbs of a serial killer. Through companies like Google and the results they serve, an individual’s digital identity is immortalized and can be retrieved upon demand. For now, Google cofounder Sergey Brin has assured me, such demands are neither made nor met. But in the face of such power, how long can that stand?

Eventually, such demand will surface, if, in fact, it has not done so already. The power of such a tool is staggering, and the threat of it being turned toward ill-considered ends quite real. In the aftermath of September 11, the Bush administration swiftly introduced legislation that redefined domestic surveillance powers. Swept up in the moment, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act, without debate. Under the act, the U.S. government may now compel companies like Google to deliver information to government agents on demand, and in secret.

The implications are far reaching, says Stewart Baker, former counsel for the National Security Agency (NSA). Under the PATRIOT Act, he told the New York Times, the government can demand information on everyone you send e-mail to, when you sent it, who replied to you, how long the messages were, whether they had attachments, as well as where you went online. With entire divisions of the FBI, NSA, and Department of Defense now committed to Internet-based surveillance, databases as rich as AOL, Google, or Yahoo will not be overlooked. And given the fact that these companies are legally obligated to remain silent about what information they might give to the government, they are inherently conflicted between the government and their millions of trusting customers. As a Google executive noted to me when I brought this up: We’re one bad story away from being seen as Big Brother.

This reality raises interesting questions about privacy, security, and out relationship to government and corporations. When our data is on our desktop, we assume that it is ours. It’s my address book that lives in Entourage, my e-mail attachments, and my hard drive inside my PowerBook. When I am looking for a file or a particular e-mail message on my local files (when I am searching my local disk), I presume that my mouse-and-click actions those of searching, finding, and manipulating data are not being watched, recorded, or analyzed by a third party for any reason, be it benign or malicious. (In many workplaces, this is certainly no longer the case, but we’ll set that aside for now.)

But when the locus of computing moves to the Web, as it clearly has for second-generation applications like social networking, search, and e-commerce, the law is far fuzzier. What of the data that is stored and created through interactions with those applications? Who owns that data? What rights to it do we have? The truth is, at this point, we just don’t know.

As we move our data to the servers at Amazon.com, Hotmail.com, Yahoo.com, and Gmail.com, we are making an implicit bargain, one that the public at large is either entirely content with, or, more likely, one that most have not taken much to heart.

The bargain is this: we trust you to not do evil things with our information. We trust that you will keep it secure, free from unlawful government or private search and seizure, and under our control at all times. We understand that you may use our data in aggregate to provide us better and more useful services, but we trust that you will not identify individuals personally through our data, nor use our personal data in a manner that would violate our own sense of privacy and freedom.

That’s a pretty large helping of trust we’re asking companies to ladle onto their corporate plate. And I’m not sure either we or they are entirely sure what to do with the implications of such a transfer. Just thinking about these implications makes a reasonable person’s head hurt.

But imagine the disorientation you might feel is search becomes self-aware capable of watching you as you interact with it.

From The Search, by John Battelle, pp. 13-16