Technology as a Red Herring

Technology is a red herring when it comes to privacy. New issues arise as technical advances make practices possible that were never feasible without the efficiencies provided by technology. Cheaper data storage makes it possible for companies and individuals to create and store massive databases of information for relatively low costs. E-commerce makes it possible for retailers to easily track a customer's buying habits over time. The Internet makes the process of accessing this information simple, fast, and very inexpensive. While none of these advances changes the basic way we interact with each other, by making certain practices easier and cheaper, they will end up being more widespread and therefore more widely contested. At first glance, technology seems to be the problem, since it's the only thing changing, but in fact it's enabling people to access information about us that we simply weren't protecting. Technology gets the blame, but technology is not the problem.

Improvements in technology constantly redefine the debate on privacy. As I mentioned, I can see a very detailed picture of your home from space. If I'm willing to pay more for the service, I can get a satellite company to take a recent picture of your home with incredible resolution. I could probably even tell if you had a barbeque that day. I can find out virtually anything I want about you; it's simply a matter of money. Satellite photos are cheap and easy, but I could always just fly over your house in an airplane and take a picture of your backyard; it would just be more expensive. Your credit report, rental history, name, personal stats such as age and height, and what kind of car you drive are all relatively easy facts to obtain online, but private investigators have always been able to obtain that same information for the right price. Technology doesn't change the amount of information available; it only increases the ease and reduces the cost of obtaining it.

We tend to see technology as a sort of anti-privacy tool that's invading our lives and violating our privacy, but maybe this is because technology is harder to understand and less tangible than other forms of communication. Webcams make it easier to record someone or something in a digital format, but small portable video cameras and still cameras have the same basic ability. Digital storage and transfer make every step of the process so much more efficient than paper-based communications. Information can be tracked and stored without us seeing it happen. However, none of these technologies creates fundamental changes in the way we deal with each other; they just make everything easier. In virtually every case, technology isn't creating a completely new practice, but optimizing existing ones.

Just as technology has created some practices we feel are threatening to privacy, it also has the potential to provide us unprecedented protection of our privacy. As technology progresses, online forms of transacting will certainly become infinitely more private than comparable offline transactions. Through anonymous payment mechanisms and anonymous browsing tools, the Internet will provide a more private and secure mechanism for transactions than the offline world could possibly provide.

Encryption technology can allow us to lock any digital e-mail or document so it can't be read without a key. Even if someone can get to our e-mails or files, they won't be able to read them unless they have the digital key. In the real world, if you can intercept a letter, you can simply open it and read its contents. If you intercept an encrypted message in the digital world, it's useless without a key.

Encryption technology will become more seamlessly integrated in tools like e-mail, allowing us to communicate more privately than ever before. Encryption can also allow you to digitally sign messages, so no one can pretend they are you by just by forging your e-mail address. These technologies will provide us a level of privacy and accountability far beyond that which we had in a paper-based world, where physical access to a document was all you needed to read its contents, and forging another's signature just meant you had a copy of their signature. These advances will allow everyone to operate with a heightened level of trust. If I send you a digitally signed e-mail, it can be considered a legally signed document by definition. If you transfer a file to me using strong encryption, you will have a high degree of confidence that no one else will be able to read that file without the key.

As technology continues to advance, we will see new devices that make it easier to protect our privacy, as well as new devices that make it more difficult to protect our privacy. We should accept these opportunities to redefine the way we deal with each other. Technology is only the means of obtaining information. Instead of focusing on technology as the problem, we must focus instead on protecting information in ways that won't be washed away by the next wave of technology.