Protect our privacy! A pact for 2014

The Sunday New York Times is a tradition in the Cringely household. Awaken from a restful slumber, consume a sit-down breakfast, and peacefully peruse the satisfyingly heavy and voluminous Sunday edition. So it pissed me off — all over again — this past weekend when I got to Margaret Atwood’s op-ed piece on the NSA infiltrating the World of Warcraft online multiplayer game.

As a lowly industry rag scribe, I have no problem admitting Atwood’s acclaimed words pack a punch I can’t equal, and in her prose, it hit me: The NSA has crossed the boundaries of good taste. We can’t buy anything online or in meatspace, read anything, say anything on my phone, even email anything to friends without knowing, worrying that one of the Sauron All-Seeing-Eye servers is watching, tracking, and recording. Now we can’t even pretend in private while playing a game that has no bearing on real life? Are you kidding?

And it’s not getting better. The NSA isn’t alone in prying into our digital details. It’s retailers, it’s market research companies, it’s data miners (duh), and worst of all, on some level, it’s us. We benefit from a certain level of privacy invasion, too. At least the NSA can say it’s ruining your private life to protect American vitality, keeping us safe from mean men in caves, while we continue to consume huge quantities of apple pie, even if the argument is largely crap.

Me? I’m just looking to suck more of your eyes into reading my pearly words of wisdom every other day. I may not be actively engaged in privacy invasion on a personal level, but this website, like all publishers, tracks user preferences, site visitation habits, whatever interests of yours we can glean, and as much as we can know about your role in the IT industry. Why? Because people paying for digital advertising expect to deeply understand a publication’s readership before they plunk down their shekels for an advert deal. We don’t attach names to that data and we don’t share it (as far as I know), but it’s still in the same vein.

And our — my — only defense is that hey, everyone is doing it. It’s true, and it’s getting worse. We know about credit card expenses, phone conversation keyword and context analysis, travel and nationality profiling — all old news. We seem to welcome new advances in this direction, such as location-aware advertising and information beamed to us via technologies like Apple’s iBeacon. That sounds useful, but it also means somewhere, someone or something knows where you are via GPS all the time. Is it me or is that not creepier than finding out about the microworms apparently living in your mouth?

Maybe it is me. Maybe I’m clinging to a definition of privacy that’s applicable only to my (older) generation. Maybe privacy isn’t disappearing as I feel in my gut, and instead I’m too curmudgeonly to realize that privacy is evolving (or devolving) in a natural process I need to accept as our society adapts to the speeding bull-in-a-china-shop momentum of technology innovation. Maybe I should ignore it and get on about my Sunday.

Then again, maybe not. In fact, hell no!

As I see it we have four possible responses to this privacy-annihilating trend:

1. Go all in
We embrace it wholeheartedly. Chug from the Kool-Aid keg and opt in, all the way. Privacy is dead, we don’t miss it, long live the new no-private lifestyle. After all, the NSA, retailers, and the host of other digital bug eyes tracking your every move aren’t really tracking you — at least not as an individual. You’re one face in millions. If they want to know what you buy on Amazon.com or like on Facebook on a collective level, so be it. They say they’re not attaching our names and we believe them. As far as law enforcement goes, as long as you don’t do something illegal (and even then), you probably won’t stand out enough for your data to land on the desk of someone who might actually judge you. Don’t worry about it. Strap on that Google Glass and hit the mall.

Cringely verdict: I can’t get on board with that; it’s too passive, too much lemming apathy, and way too creepy. Plus, that “not on an individual level” stuff is a rancid lie.

2. Go all out
Fight, fight against the dying of the privacy light. Drop off the grid. Boycott Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumbler, Pinterest, whatever, and condemn it all to the searing hell in which it rightfully deserves to cook. Band together and organize meatspace rallies, class-action lawsuits, and whatever else we can think of to disrupt the great digital marketing, information devouring, military-industrial establishment and beat it like a drum until it finally breathes its last and we can all go back to the way it (allegedly) was.

Cringely verdict: Again, no. It’s too reactionary, and I’m not sure I want to go back to the way it was, whatever that means.

3. Pull a Hunter S. Thompson
We still condemn it all to a fiery pit of hell to fry. We comment constantly and drop F-bombs in clever places to maintain awareness. Never stop watching, never stop commenting, and in between rants, numb our worries with lots of scotch and mescaline. Selah.

Cringely verdict: Close, but not quite enough, though the scotch part sounds dead-on.

4. My official New Year’s resolution
Vigilance and awareness are critical, but we need to stop merely accepting with sage wags of our heads and quiet tsk-tsking. There’s a middle ground between spending your life staging rallies or sit-ins and doing nothing. If enough of us get involved a little bit, it’ll have more impact anyway. When they’re struggling on the field, fourth quarter, game tied, what gets a team’s attention more effectively? That small group of half-naked fans who’ve painted themselves like garden gnomes with team colors or the entire stadium taking two seconds to stand up with their hands over their heads to do a wave?

That’s what we need to start doing. Work the wave. Take an hour out of your day (just once) and do a Web search to find exactly who your congressmen, senators, and other miscellaneous representatives are. Get their email addresses, Facebook pages, website URLs, and write them down. Put together a group email list.

Then when I or some other fourth-estate yahoo report on yet another new technology hitting the market that will dig just a little further into your private life and that’s not being controlled in an effective way, send a quick email. Another privacy data breach that could have been avoided? Send an email. It takes less than 30 seconds, and if email is exposing too much of who you are, there’s always the more anonymous, but no less effective Facebook or website comments route.

Right now, we’re mostly apathetic and accepting of something that could really be harmful if the wrong people wind up controlling too much of it. Those checks and balances are being crushed like drunk squirrels on a highway in rush hour. You folks out there in reader-land need to stand up a bit in 2014 — let them know we’re still here, we still care, and we can still vote them out if they sit around and do nothing. The same technology that’s being used to rob our privacy can also be used to get our politicians’ attention in a big way.

For my part, I need to step up my game this year. Maybe a little less ranting about gadgets and a little more about trends that require me to do more research, make more phone calls, attend more events. It’s not too much, but it’s a little more than what I’m doing now. At least, that’s my new year’s resolution. What’s yours?