Chapter 8: Convenience and the Death of Privacy

Overview

There is a persistent tension between "privacy"—our innate desire to control the information that is known about us—and "convenience"-our equally innate desire for day-to-day life to be a little easier. As we'll see in more detail below, the credit card is the perfect embodiment of that tension: It is much easier to pay for things by signing a small slip of paper than to carry around large amounts of cash or write out checks at each store. But in exchange for the convenience it offers, the credit card extracts a payment in personal privacy. Each time you use your credit card, your bank knows a little bit more about your spending habits, your dietary preferences, and your movements.

The trading of privacy for convenience has become so commonplace that we often don't even think about it. Rather than clip coupons, we use a grocer's savings card to get automatic deductions at the cash register—but at the same time, a record of our specific purchases is steadily being compiled. ^[1] On the Internet, we accept "cookies" from websites so that we don't have to reenter our user ID and password each time we enter a site like nytimes.com—but those same cookies help websites track which pages we look at and the sites we visit afterwards.

Companies make the exchange of privacy for convenience more palatable by offering the carrot of improved service. It's an old idea, of course: Five-star hotels thrive in part because of the detailed (and highly personal) notes that they keep of their repeat customers. The invasion of the guest's privacy is more than compensated by the hotel's ability to provide individualized service, to make the guest feel truly welcome. And we all enjoy feeling welcome, even if it's just a bunch of barflies yelling "Norm!" when we walk through the door.

The sacrificing of personal privacy for convenience occurs in the workplace as well, but the exchange is less voluntary. If you are expected to use a company car, phone, or credit card, those items will reveal information about you regardless of whether you want it revealed. In fact, many employers actively seek out the information that can be collected from company vehicles or credit cards. Anytime you go out on the road, whether it's in a dusty van with the company logo plastered on the side or on the Concorde, an inherent tension arises between the freedom of being outside the office and your responsibility to your employer. At a bare minimum, there's the question of productivity: Are you spending your time wisely? Until recently, employers had relatively few means of monitoring your productivity outside of the workplace. Essentially, the employer's assessment was limited to results: Did you finish your route? How do your sales figures compare to other employees? Do customers complain about you?

To varying degrees, employers were willing to give their employees some latitude in how they did their work outside of the office so long as the work actually got done. But as our culture and legal system have changed over the last century, more serious questions have arisen: Are you being loyal? Are you doing something that will reflect badly on the corporation or cause it to be sued? The answers to those types of questions depends in large part, obviously, on what you were doing and when you were doing it.

^[1]As we'll see later on, it's one thing for a consumer to agree to allow a grocer to track purchases in exchange for discounts. It's another thing altogether for the grocer to turn around and then market your purchasing profile to a third party. At the very least, the question arises as to whether you've been adequately compensated for the further use of your information.