Stanford CIS

Siri Is Judging You

By Ryan Calo on

In a fresh and recent whitepaper, Brookings Institution senior fellow Benjamin Wittes and law student Jodie Liu turn the standard privacy argument on its head: as they see it, many supposed threats to our privacy actually benefit it.

Their lead example is the Internet. Whereas once you had to purchase pornography or condoms from a human—risking the famous “Hey Ralph! How much for a copy of Orgasm?” scene in Woody Allen’sBananas—now you can search from the privacy of your own home. They offer some fun examples. Wittes and Liu point to the astronomical sales of Fifty Shades of Gray, for instance, and ask whether you have actually seen someone purchasing, checking out, or reading the book…

I take their point that the debates we have over privacy and technology have a tendency to “keep score very badly,” in the sense of taking privacy gains for granted while obsessing over privacy losses. The example I have always liked for this point is the move away from a “party line” in the 1940s, where any neighbor could listen to your phone calls, to today’s impersonal computerized switch boards.

Wittes and Liu acknowledge that different people might be listening in than before—the government, for instance, or the Internet service provider. But for many, they say, “these threats feel theoretical.” It’s the people around us that we really worry about when we think about privacy, and these people no longer see our inquiries or purchases.

Read the full piece at Forbes Tech.

Published in: Publication , Other Writing , Privacy