Suspected terrorist: multimillionaire John Gilmore is suing the government to remain anonymous. Is this the last stand for privacy?

Reason, August, 2003 by Brian Doherty

There is a tension in the privacy activist community between the perception of government as the great violator of privacy and the perception of it as our champion against the depredations of rapacious marketers. But ultimately all marketers want to do with information about you is pitch products more effectively. The real threat that private databases pose is limned by TIA--that they can and will be accessed by the government for its own purposes. Businesses can and will market obtrusively, but in the end they need their customers' good will and are at least in theory amenable to contract to regulate what they do with the information they collect. Government can and will jail you--and unless you happen to be part of a significant voting bloc, it doesn't particularly care what you think about it.

Once a technology is out of the box, it can't be taped back up and returned to the manufacturer. People will do what people are able to do. But they won't necessarily do it all the time. Good sense, kindness, and decency can be surprisingly potent weapons against unchecked human power and ambition, as can convention and even new technologies. Answering machines and call-muting, for example, evolved to manage the privacy-shattering powers of the telephone, a device that allows strangers to set off alarms in your house simply by punching a few numbers on a remote keypad. Technology's eyes and ears are spreading, as are the "brains" to process the signals that ceaselessly pour in from them. But will these sensors inevitably be everywhere?

The technological know-how that leads to privacy-destroying devices could also lead to mechanisms to disable those devices, or to render unnecessary some innovations potentially hazardous to privacy. For example, the VeriChip--essentially an RFID implanted in your body--could contain all your medical records. No outside database would be needed; any doctor could access your vital data from the chip.

In many significant areas of life, the legal and technological fight for privacy appears to be over. Your employer pretty much has the right--and the ability, thanks to aforementioned technologies and things like keystroke-recording software--to snoop on everything you do, say, and write while on his property. It is an irony little appreciated by those who call on the government to protect your privacy from your boss that the biggest job-privacy concerns are caused by government policies. These include the tax laws that link health insurance to your job and thus make all your choices--even in private life--part of the boss' bottom line, and the occupational safety and discrimination laws (and lawsuits) that drive most employer record-keeping.

Courts have declared that being visually snooped on in public spaces is just fine, since you have no meaningful presumption of privacy there. Thus the awesome proliferation of video surveillance cameras. No one seems to know exactly how many are out there--national estimates range from 2 million to 11 million. In New York, the Surveillance Camera Players, a guerrilla theater group, is trying to change the social consensus about these cameras. Members count cameras and, when they find them, map them on the World Wide Web. Such grassroots activism and information-sharing might do more to help individuals make their own choices about how much privacy means to them than will any national legislation.