On a recent visit to Washington, D.C., I had a series of meetings with people charged with helping the rest of us understand how technology is making life more livable. It is an essential strategy for those companies hoping to keep legislators’ eyes elsewhere. In particular, at a time when government surveillance and corporate data mining are stories being told daily, popular understanding of how much information is being created is not leading to popular acceptance.
For companies, consumers and their governments caught up in these stories, previous points of outrage like mobile device tracking capability and online behavioral advertising seem quaint. For legislators, surveillance technology shreds citizens’ (read: voters’) privacy. For consumers, big data makes the personal way too public. For government, the combination of the two — collecting and mining vast amounts of data — the task is to see but not be seen.
Whether an advocate or a critic of these technologies, their complexity (a counter-intuitive by-product of making it easy to use) has put an emphasis on outcomes. That’s why governments talk about security — “We’ve prevented (fill-in-the-blank-number) terrorist attacks” — and companies talk about insights — “Big Data saves babies” — in an attempt to get the rest of us to rest a little easier. It is not an uncommon communications strategy. Not quite as cynical as “the end justifies the means” and not as naive as “we’re from Washington and we’re here to help.” Clearly somewhere in between.
How are we to make sense of it? How can we decide if security is being properly balanced with surveillance; if my personal digital data stream is being panned for gold that benefits me, too?
Context, of course, plays a role. Recent reports cite about 3,000 privacy violations a year in the surveillance program of the National Security Administration. A big number, at least until you consider the fact that if the 1 million targets of the program make 1 billion calls, then, well the picture looks quite a bit different. At the same time, when we use our membership card at the supermarket check-out and get coupons for items we actually buy, it seems like a pretty good deal.
This does not diminish the need for surveillance of government to match surveillance by government. And it does not substitute for the choice of opting-in to data collection programs rather than being forced to opt-out. But it does suggest we each need to determine our own level of comfort with the data collected and its use. This is not a decision that can be outsourced.
