Distracted Digital Lens: Privacy Police

How Privacy Politics Push False Culture

Your inside is out when your outside is in, Your outside is in when your inside is out
So come on come on, Come on its such a joy, Come on its such a joy
Come on let's make it easy, Come on let's make it easy, Make it easy, make it easy
Everybody's got something to hide except for me and My monkey
  — Lennon/McCartney (1968), White Album

When you observe a piece of art, you do so with a perspective and a context. You might be on your phone viewing it alone, or among a crowd in a museum or gallery. You may wish to view it closer or farther away, the room light will carry the colors and shapes differently, and you may have a sore back. Everything that you experience adds up into the moment you perceive. Some art asks us to step outside our immediate boundaries and follow the artist to some foreign and far-off land where all the rules are changed, in subtle but meaningful delight. To take a walk in the mind of an artist is a wonderfully refreshing practice that oft pulls us away from the everyday nature of our own thoughts. The same applies to all forms of art, from literature to visual effects.

An important and irreplaceable part of artistic expression of any kind is that the artist is attempting to guide your attention and sensations in a certain way - ask something of your mind that it would not ask itself without the unique lens of the artist's perspective.

Our personal perspectives have increasingly become less physical and more digital. Especially during the lockdown, an increasing number of us in a more intense fashion lived wholly online and viewed the world and our fellow humans through a digital lens. An established habit many people are more than willing to continue now that the world has opened up again. Digital artists and authors work just as hard to express a perspective or a lens through which we can try to understand a feeling, a concept, a thought - but inevitably our tools shape us as we shape our tools (McLuhan).

Generally we may consider platforms as inert stages upon which artists or we ourselves can perform and share the thoughts and feelings we have. However, it is more comparable to throwing a message in a bottle into the ocean. There are huge systems that are tuning the way that we interchange information.

Means of Control

Right now, as you read this, rows and rows of multi-million dollar computers in the endless halls of a chill and dark data center are hard at work collecting what you do, what your friends do, and what you say to each other. You may ask the simple question: What would they want to know about me? What do I have to hide? - And for those who cry "I have nothing to hide!" - send me your diaries.

For those exhausted by fanciful tales of a looming big brother; some central agency of government peeking into every corner of your life, feel free to let that go. The Government is a slow and process-ridden bureaucratic machine that does not measure up in any sense to the many multinational companies around the world now profiting on the trade of Personal Information.

The excuses to extract information range from contribution to scientific causes like detecting heart disease to social pressures like not allowing a person to communicate unless they elect to share their personal information. Apple even went against its core belief of user privacy (supposedly) and announced they would be "automatically scanning" for "illicit material". The excuse of "saving the children" or "catching the terrorists" will forever bolster the arguments of authoritarian regimes.

Companies promise and excuse Personal Info collection and hoarding based on some vague idea that the information, gathered at scale, loses its ability to single anyone out. Once the data is collected though, the data is collected. To understand the depth of this problem consider the movie Gattaca and the business of the company 23&me. We are waltzing ferventy towards such a future. You can buy the data online if you know where to look. Either it is sold off by defectors, "legitimately" through shell corporations, or by hackers who have exploited weak systems.

It's never been easier to cross-correlate and de-anonymize data. If we cannot prove that it is not so, we must assume that the data is collected aggressively, kept forever, and can be de-anonymized - along with systems that are being developed to ingest huge amounts of data (modern Artificial Intelligence Systems) - we can conclude with fair certainty that our data is feeding AI. We now have AI that can generate whatever moving images or text that we want - those didn't just appear from out of nowhere - we contributed each and every picture or string of text. What is to stop us from assuming that AI is being used on the collected personal data, and that internally the AI can effortlessly de-anonymize the data or group humans along axes that we don't understand. For instance, the success of TikTok is openly attributed to their engagement flywheel using AI to determine what would drive continuous engagement. It works and has made waves across the tech industry. The spread of a foreign country's app has stricken fear into a lot of American three-letter agencies prompting its divesture from ByteDance, the parent company. But what is rather more important to realize: Chinese law mandates the type of content allowed on Douyin (Chinese Tiktok), as well as the hours per week citizens can engage. Those limits, not in place for Americans, lead us (especially those more susceptible to addiction) to media glut we cannot control.

There exists AI that can generate almost any moving images or text. You must understand there also exists AI that can identify who is going to your house and work every day. That one small correlation can be used that as a key to unlock your identity, then sell the resulting inferences to other companies for whatever purpose.

How to Fight the Advertisement Tracking System

How it Should Work (Your data is for you)

I'm going to propose something radical: Your data should be collected. Your data should be processed. Your data should even be used to predict things about you. The only things that make those acts anti-humanist are when the data is in the hands of a corporate entity (or hundreds) and is being used to predict and convince you. If instead, your data was your own, and it was safeguarded first and foremost - and then secondly used by a context engine that you have explicit control over to actually help you in your life. If you like the same coffee every morning, or if you don't like tomatoes on your burger - these are measurable things that a computer could be helping you with. Right now, your phone, your computer(s), your devices of all kinds have no idea that each other exist - despite all having the same owner! Instead we have apps that try to find out everything about you, and you need to give them a passcode to access your own secrets. It makes no sense if it is viewed from a utilitarian or personal perspective.

However, until we have a system that respects the user as the human that they are, there are some small things that you can do to protect yourself. These steps are excerpted from the excellent book "Means of Control" by Byron Tau (2024).

1 - Don't use clouds (especially free ones), and if you use any storage service it should be zero-knowledge end-to-end encrypted.
Examples: For iDevices enable "Advanced Data Protection", Proton Mail, Tutanota, Signal, iMessage, pCloud, Tresorit.

2 - Encrypt your data, but more importantly delete old data. Use Ephemeral messaging, set up autodeletion for old email. 
Examples: Signal, Confide offer disappearing messages.

3 - Every single device you own has privacy settings. Check them because the defaults typically enable data collection, targeted ads, or "more relevant advertising". Turn that off. 

4 - Read the terms of service and privacy policies for the things you use. Either it will state that they "will never sell your data to thrid parties" explicitly, or they will say that "we may disclose your information to third parties to deliver you better services, targeted advertising, or to comply with applicable law". Most people do not even skim the agreements, and that means they could contain anything.  

5 - Take advantage of anonymity technologies. Ad-Blockers, privacy-focused browser, a firewall, or a trusted VPN (with a no-log policy).
Examples: uBlock, EFF's Privacy Badger, Vivaldi Browser (has ad and tracker blocking), SponsorBlock, ChannelBlock

6 - If something doesn't seem right, don't do it. If something keeps asking for your location, and it really doesn't need it - say no. Don't click strange links. 

7 - Pay Money. Avoid 'free' software that takes your data for behavioural advertising.