Emotions ran high at this week’s Privacy Identity and Innovation conference in Seattle. They usually do when the topic of privacy and technology is raised, and to me that was the real take-away from the event.
As expected, the organizers did an excellent job providing attendees with provocative panels, presentations and keynotes talks—in particular an excellent presentation from my former UC Berkeley colleague Marc Davis, who has just joined Microsoft.
There were smart ideas from several entrepreneurs working on privacy-related startups, and deep thinking from academics, lawyers and policy analysts.
There were deep dives into new products from Intel, European history and the metaphysics of identity.
But what interested me most was just how emotional everyone gets at the mere mention of private information, or what is known in the legal trade as “personally-identifiable” information. People get enervated just thinking about how it is being generated, collected, distributed and monetized as part of the evolution of digital life. And pointing out that someone is having an emotional reaction often generates one that is even more primal.
Privacy, like the related problems of copyright, security, and net neutrality, is often seen as a binary issue. Either you believe governments and corporations are evil entities determined to strip citizens and consumers of all human dignity or you think, as leading tech CEOs have the unfortunate habit of repeating, that privacy is long gone, get over it.
But many of the individual problems that come up are much more subtle that that. Think of Google Street View which has generated investigations and litigation around the world, particularly in Germany where, as Jeff Jarvis pointed out, Germans think nothing of naked co-ed saunas.
Or how about targeted or personalized or, depending on your conclusion about it, “behavioral” advertising? Without it, whether on broadcast TV or the web, we don’t get great free content. And besides, the more targeted advertising is, the less we have to look at ads for stuff we aren’t the least bit interested in and the more likely that an ad isn’t just an annoyance but is actually helpful.
On the other hand, ads that suggest products and services I am specifically interested in are “creepy.” (I find them creepy, but I expect I’ll get used to it, especially when they work.)
And what about governments? Governments shouldn’t be spying on their citizens, but at the same time we’re furious when bad guys aren’t immediately caught using every ounce of surveillance technology in the arsenal.
Search engines, mobile phone carriers and others are berated for retaining data (most of it not even linked to individuals, or at least not directly) and at the same time are required to retain it for law enforcement purposes. The only difference is the proposed use of the information (spying vs. public safety), which can only be known after data collection.
As comments from Jeff Jarvis and Andrew Keen in particular got the audience riled up, I found myself having an increasingly familiar but strange response. The more contentious and emotional the discussion became, the more I found myself agreeing with everything everyone was saying, including those who appeared to be violently disagreeing.
Fore more, see "Meditations in a Privacy Emergency."