Forward Lateral

I’ve commented some at Bruce Schneier’s blog. Bruce does a great job of writing about cryptography. He also covers privacy issues and, unfortunately, isn’t nearly as thorough. To be sure, it is a thorny problem and it seems to bring the ideological kooks out of the woodwork. This makes “rational debate” quite difficult.

My concern is that changing technologies are presenting new privacy issues that are being ignored. For example, while video cameras have been around for a while, digital technology continuously reduces the cost — virtually to zero. Storage and network capacity grows exponentially, and we now have the ability to link all video cameras into a large network. We also have the technology, using facial recognition, triangulation, and other new approaches, to recognize individuals on camera and link them into a centralized database.

Without any constraints, we could be headed towards a dystopic future depicted in Orwell’s 1984 or Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. In these worlds, video surveillance is covert and pervasive, and those in power have the ability to use this information to their advantage. Is this an unrealistic scenario? I think not.

Anyway, in Face Recognition Comes to Bars, I stated what I thought was obvious:

One point that I have not seen raised much, if at all, is that humans have a deeply-ingrained fear of “being watched.” After all, for thousands of millenia [sic], being watched often meant being stalked by a hungry predator or a vicious rival. So it’s no small wonder that we’ve developed an acute sensitivity to and healthy aversion to this situation.

In The Future of Privacy, I echoed this notion:

The reality is that humans hate to be watched, and that for our entire existence, we have gone about or daily business confident that we were not being watched — and we were mostly correct in that assumption. (And when we were incorrect, bad things followed …)

My point, which I expressed in my comment, is that we have a natural, emotional response to the idea of “being watched”:

I think this underlying fear is what drives our visceral and emotional response to covert or pervasive video surveillance. Personally, my stomach turns at the thought of an Orwellian future in which, the moment I step outside of my home, all of my actions are recorded, logged and aggregated.

In other words, setting aside the fact that there are logical arguments for restricting how this kind of information is handled (i.e. the great potential for abuse), there are emotional reasons as well.

Imagine my surprise when, after pointing these comments out to my father, he said my statement is “paranoid.” Ironic, too, since I also wrote in my comment:

When this feeling is persistent, isn’t that one of the classic symptoms of paranoia? To subject the entire populace to pervasive surveillance seems like a kind of torture — even without considering the potential abuses.

For the record: No, I don’t think that I am being watched. I’m not paranoid, yet.

I find it ludicrous that anyone would actually question the notion that we have evolved a sense of anxiety about being watched. It’s in our vernacular! But, I guess the onus is on me to prove my point. I would love to hear any evidence in support of this notion, or to the contrary. In the meantime, perhaps I should check out some psychology papers …

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 12th, 2006 at 4:34 pm and is filed under Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.