Privacy & Surveillance

Posts under this category name relate to privacy generally, rather than distinguishing between the various ‘kinds’ of discussing or recognizing privacy.

Online Data Storage and Privacy

/ Christopher Parsons

Last week Google, Microsoft, and Apple revealed updates to their online data storage platforms – Google now lets users purchase additional space for their various Google applications, Microsoft provides a Live Skydrive (essentially an online network drive), and Apple completely revamped their .Mac solution.

The idea behind these services is that people that are already using, or are considering using, the aforementioned companies’ online services and will be enticed by the idea that they could store hordes of information in ‘safe’ repositories; we can trust that neither Google, Microsoft, or Apple would lose our data, right? This isn’t entirely true – at least Google and Microsoft have previously lost client data and could not always restore it. Individuals cannot count on any of these services, though they are likely to be more reliable than personal backups. What’s more, these online solutions just make life easier by letting users stop worrying about performing personal data backups – this is their real selling feature.

There are issues that emerges with all of these services – first clients cannot know what country their data is being stored in, potentially leaving their data subject to foreign surveillance laws, and second clients cannot verify what any of these corporations are actually doing with their data.

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Search and Privacy

/ Christopher Parsons

People use Google and Yahoo! throughout their daily lives – they need to know how to get from point a to b, need to find ecommerce sites, need to search friends’ blogs, need to learn how to cook fish, and have (generally) grown used to having the equivalent of electronic encyclopedias at their fingertips at all times. I’m not going to bother addressing concerns that this might be detrimentally affecting how people learn to retain information (i.e. as information is increasingly retained as search strings rather than as info-articles) but want to instead briefly consider how search intersects with privacy.

We hear about the need to protect our private information all of the time. ‘Shred your bank statements’, ‘be wary of online commerce sites’, ‘never share personal information on the ‘net’, and other proclamations of wisdom are uttered in print and video on a regular basis which are, in most cases, completely ignored. Proponents of the commercialization of privacy use this as definitive proof that citizens really don’t care about their privacy like they did in days gone past – people are willing to give up their names, addresses, phone numbers, and other personal information to receive services that they want. In light of this regulators should just butt out – the market has spoken!

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Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt and Google Corporation

/ Christopher Parsons

In recent months more and more attention has been directed towards Google’s data retention policies. In May of 2007 Peter Fleishcher of Google’s global privacy counsel established three key reasons for why his company had to maintain search records:

  1. To improve their services. Specifically, he writes “Search companies like Google are constantly trying to improve the quality of their search services. Analyzing logs data is an important tool to help our engineers refine search quality and build helpful new services . . . The ability of a search company to continue to improve its services is essential, and represents a normal and expected use of such data.”
  2. To maintain security and prevent fraud and abuse. “Data protection laws around the world require Internet companies to maintain adequate security measures to protect the personal data of their users. Immediate deletion of IP addresses from our logs would make our systems more vulnerable to security attacks, putting the personal data of our users at greater risk. Historical logs information can also be a useful tool to help us detect and prevent phishing, scripting attacks, and spam, including query click spam and ads click spam.”
  3. To comply with legal obligations to retrieve data. “Search companies like Google are also subject to laws that sometimes conflict with data protection regulations, like data retention for law enforcement purposes.” (Source)

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Public and Private Digital Space

/ Christopher Parsons

Ask yourself a question: Why does having private space matter to you? When it comes right down to it, why is it important to maintain the public-private distinction?

Some might immediately assert that the distinction establishes a space where government interests cannot easily intrude, and that the private domain is where individuals develop themselves while hidden from the nation-state’s coercive gaze. When we can speak privately and associate off-the-record we can more easily develop friendships that we might have otherwise shied away from. Moreover, without this private space individuals might not be comfortable talking to one another about radical political, ethical, or cultural issues – if the state could be recording our discussions, then we would have to evaluate whether or not we really wanted to discuss topics such as the value of overthrowing the present government, the importance of weakening the authorities’ scopes of legitimate action, or the value of weakening national rhetoric in favour of plurality.

While there have been clashes about where the division between public and private should be, those clashes often relate to where a line should be drawn rather than about abolishing the line entirely. Some, of course, insist that the public and private are mere phantasms, and that they only exist because we perpetuate a myths of their existence, but for this position to gain traction it must grapple with the necessary co-originality of public and private that is revealed in an examination of the nation-state’s founding. Feminists (accurately) focus on the harms that the strict division between public and private have caused, such as the suppression of women’s issues and the criminal discrimination against women and their labours, but this demonstrates that there is a porous boundary between public and private that must be examined rather than asserting that it absolutely does not exist.

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