Everything we thought we knew about privacy needs rethinking
Could health authorities force us to publish every detail of our daily activities by insisting we all carry smartphones with monitoring apps revealing not just how long we slept, but where?
And not just health authorities: your environmental authority may be interested in using such facilities for measuring your personal resource consumption and waste output, using such factors as your carbon footprint and environmental impact in order to calculate your taxes and benefits entitlements.
About rethinking how we do privacy
Long before the provision of any of this private data is insisted upon, we could find ourselves revealing it unintentionally, simply because we fail to consider the fact that voluntarily allowing others to monitor us for our own benefit does not mean that we are obliged to automatically release whatever is recorded, irrespective of the relevance to the benefit we are seeking.
A seminal article on this aspect of privacy was published in August 2009 by Katie Shilton of UCLA.
It was called:
Privacy, mobile phones, and ubiquitous data collection
Participatory sensing technologies could improve our lives and our communities, but at what cost to our privacy?
It was published in The Association for Computing Machinery‘s Queue Magazine
In this talk, Deborah Estrin raises the issue that addressing this ‘lack of attention to privacy’ is at least as much of an obligation on the part of those involved in doing the monitoring as it is for those being monitored.
The smartphone app may record everything, but the right to restrict what it reports to the person analysing the data is a privacy issue: the app should allow the person being monitored to see whatever was recorded, but it should only allow others to see what they ‘need to know’ and absolutely nothing else.
How to go about specifying what ‘they’ need to extract from the ‘recording of your life’ that the app has made, and why they need it, is something we need to be working on right now, if privacy is not going to be unnecessarily undermined.
Maintaining privacy includes being in a position to tell those of a nosy, prying disposition to ‘mind their own business’, which is something which has been made more complex by the fact that ‘our personal business’ can now be made accessible in ways we are often not even aware of.
This puts a serious burden of responsibility upon authorities, regulators and providers of these new monitoring facilities to ensure that the issue of openly formulating and implementing a consumer-confidentiality-protective privacy policy is given even higher priority and urgency than deployment of the personal monitoring facilities themselves.
About Deborah Estrin
Deborah Estrin is a professor of Computer Science at UCLA.
She is the daughter of Gerald Estrin, also a UCLA Computer Science professor, and the sister of Judy Estrin.
She is a pioneer in the field of embedded network sensing and is the director of the Center for Embedded Network Sensing (CENS) at UCLA.
She is on the advisory board of TTI/Vanguard.
In 2003, Popular Science named her one of their “Brilliant 10″ for that year.
In 2007, Estrin was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also a fellow of the ACM and the IEEE.
About CENS
The Center for Embedded Network Sensing (CENS) is a research enterprise funded by the National Science Foundation based at the University of California, Los Angeles.
CENS was established at UCLA in 2002.
The group conducts research primarily in the computer science subfield of embedded sensor networks.
While it is headquartered at UCLA, the following universities and organizations also participate in CENS-led research:
- University of California, Merced
- University of California, Riverside
- University of Southern California
- The USC Information Sciences Institute
- California State University, Los Angeles
- The James Reserve
- NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- Caltech
The video is a recording of an event entitled TEDx SB
This first TEDxSB was held on Saturday April 17, 2010 at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
TEDxSB is an independently organized event in Santa Barbara to showcase and discuss creativity, learning and innovation with an eye on making the world a better place.
About TEDx
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group.
These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event.
The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)
Although I agree to some extent that important for us to be aware of our “personal resource consumption and waste output”, because of environmental reasons and the fact that we need to be more responsible where the planet is concerned, I find the whole business with the monitoring apps disturbingly Orwellian. In the age of social networking sites which allow their users to post updates about daily events before, during and after said events, it seems like we place little importance in our right to privacy.
This new app will probably be accepted by the majority, possibly as a result of conditioning (my generation was raised on reality TV and surveillance cameras), but a lot of people will find the concept distasteful. It’s like having a random stranger stealing into your bathroom everyday and taking out samples of your toilet water and using the samples to determine whether or not you’re entitled to health insurance.
If this app is going to be used, I agree with the article writer that the app should allow the person using the app to see the things that were recorded. I’m interested to see how the authorities and regulators of these new monitoring apps determine which types of information are necessary, and which are unlawful to take.
In addition, those who are being monitored by this app should be given the choice to withhold certain pieces of information they feel uncomfortable sharing,
I actually agree Meg. It’s not really something that one would prefer, giving out information without him/her being aware of what things are recorded or not. But my real caveat on this issue is, are all of these really necessary? Let’s say we throw away the privacy issue out the window, do we really need such measures to better our lives? For me, that’s a really important question. Privacy notwithstanding, it’s still something that we can do without.
Exactly, Rob. It’s not necessary, but often it’s the things that aren’t necessary that get made.
You can probably get the same information as this app can by doing surveys from household to household. It’s less efficient, maybe, but that system has worked for a long time and it doesn’t impinge on people’s right to privacy.
I’m all for applications that provide real insights to problems that real people deal with, but when it comes to having privacy compromised, it becomes a different issue altogether. I just don’t think that such applications should be made that would compromise privacy, not at any known level.
True. I see a growing trend in apps that violate privacy laws, and it’s something that we should worry about. Even if the app in question is “necessary”. Facebook has been the target of several accusations by privacy watchdogs, and for good reason.
http://www.scmagazineus.com/facebook-accused-of-violating-privacy-laws/article/146752/
yeah, actually Facebook has had its share of privacy issues. Not to mention that FB has faced controversies regarding accounts being disabled without the user’s knowledge. Here’s a link that provides more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Disabling_of_user_accounts
What is necessary is debatable, so it might prove to be a difficult, if not insurmountable, challenge for the makers and future users of this monitoring app to find a clear cut line between “necessary information” and “right to privacy violation”.Hopefully if this app gets off the ground, the authorities will be able to create a fair privacy policy.
For me it’s not about developers making such apps get around the issue of privacy, but more on the issue of having such applications being developed. I mean, have we been so busy and apathetic that such details/information need to be entrusted to simple applications instead of a more personal and in-depth approach?
If we’re not too busy to watch TV, we’re probably not too busy to fill in a couple of surveys. Like I mentioned in a previous comment, doing door-to-door surveys like the Census Board does or other traditional methods of gathering information are still effective, and apps like these are made in order to make the gathering of information easier and more “convenient”. Convenience comes at a price, and the price we pay for convenience may be much higher than the time and effort we save.
Right on, Meg. Convenience does come at a price, and I don’t think our privacy is something that should be compromised for convenience. I would suggest something more personal, much like in-depth surveys or interviews; maybe not as easy as some application from smartphones or what not, but much more effective and more reliable without any adverse effects on our right to privacy.
I mean, no one would really be thrilled about their privacy being trampled on, right? It’s a right that should be protected with utmost importance, even if our lives are not deemed important by other entities or institutions.