If you need to find a cab in a crowded city, there's an app for that. If you need to figure out your share of a restaurant bill, there's an app for that. If you want to creep on that smokin' hottie who sits next to you in your speech class, there's an app for that as well.
This is not all the world has on you. Every time you swipe a credit card, search the Web, check your e-mail, enter your residence hall, send a text, pay a bill or fire up the TiVo, a server somewhere records this information. We are all mountains upon mountains of data. To companies like Facebook or Google interested in selling advertisements that we'll click, this is a very valuable thing, more so than it's ever been in history. To those who want it, like corporations or governments, it's more available than any moment before.
Our presence in datasets that we encounter in our wired world is so valuable that more transparency in its utilization should be available to users. We need to demand the right to know who is collecting our information and why they are accessing it.
Many may wonder, why would anyone ever want information on me? For those of us reading who are neither terrorists nor drug traffickers, this may seem like a minor issue. As long as the information gathered by the government or corporations is used responsibly, why should I care who is accessing it? For the ones who wonder this, I ask in response, what about those who fled an abusive relationship and fear being tracked down by an angry spouse? Or have a religious philosophy different from the norm and wish not to be persecuted for it? Or have a sexual preference marginalized by society yet do not wish it to cost them a job? There is more than enough information that should not be scrutinized in the public sphere.
Maybe you value your privacy, but perhaps you don't believe that governments or corporations could ever get access to this information. Data mining has also gotten incredibly easy, especially with the advent of digital sweatshops. The massive online retailer Amazon.com has a market for what's called mechanical Turks, the human laborers in a digital sweatshop. For usually about a penny, the human users on Amazon's marketplace will perform a task like categorizing a blog or searching for vandalism on Wikipedia, issues that computers still have trouble resolving. Many cell phone users have texted the service ChaCha, which is the same idea. For a few cents an answer, Turks, a group of mostly college students, will respond to questions sent from cell phones across the country.
Tasks like these are beneficial, but the technology can be manipulated for malice. Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain offered a scenario in a November 2009 forum with the Commonwealth Club of California. The Iranian government, he proposed, could have used Turks to identify protestors. Simply show an ID card photo and ask if the man or woman viewable in this photo is identifiable in any other photo taken by surveillance cameras or the media. By offering a few cents for the work, the Iranian government could survey all the faces of its 72 million citizens for about the equivalent price of a Honda Civic.
Privacy lets us retain our individuality, yet technologies of the past decade threaten it. However, we should not change the technology, but rather how it is used, for the stakes in living in a country without privacy are too high.
Another award-winning newspaper reported from Beijing, China reported "The World Wide Web, a device used solely for the enrichment of the nation and the advancement of lasting social stability, gained another website for the convenience of its users Monday, bringing the current number of existing Internet destinations to 12." Strict censoring over something like the Internet seems ridiculous to us. We might hope that violations of freethinking always seem that way, but we must remember there is no app for civil liberty, though there's an app for protecting it. It's called democracy.
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