A World Without Privacy Will Revive The Masquerade

A World Without Privacy Will Revive the Masquerade - The Atlantic 2022-09-07, 8:21 PM
TECHNOLOGY
A World Without Privacy Will

Revive the Masquerade
As the growing scale of facial recognition shows, more data can always
be extracted.
By Jonathan Zittrain
A monitor displays the Omron Corp. Okao face and emotion detection technology during CES 2020. (Bridget Bennett / Bloomberg via Getty)
FEBRUARY 7, 2020 SHARE
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Twenty years ago at a Silicon Valley product launch, Sun Microsystems CEO
Scott McNealy dismissed concern about digital privacy as a red herring: “You
have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”
“Zero privacy” was meant to placate us, suggesting that we have a fixed
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stuff about ourselves that we’d like to keep private. Once we Sign In Subscribe
realized that stuff had already been exposed and, yet, the world still turned, we
would see that it was no big deal. But what poses as unsentimental truth
telling isn’t cynical enough about the parlous state of our privacy.
That’s because the barrel of privacy invasion has no bottom. The rallying cry
for privacy should begin with the strangely heartening fact that it can always
get worse. Even now there’s something yet to lose, something often worth
fiercely defending.
A DV E RT I S E M E N T
FIND YOURS
For a recent example, consider Clearview AI: a tiny, secretive startup that
became the subject of a recent investigation by Kashmir Hill in The New York
Times. According to the article, the company scraped billions of photos from
social-networking and other sites on the web—without permission from the
sites in question, or the users who submitted them—and built a
comprehensive database of labeled faces primed for search by facial
recognition. Their early customers included multiple police departments (and
individual officers), which used the tool without warrants. Clearview has
argued they have a right to the data because they’re “public.”
In general, searching by a face to gain a name and then other information is

on the verge of wide availability: The Russian internet giant Yandex appears to
have deployed facial-recognition technology in its image search tool. If you
upload an unlabeled picture of my face into Google image search, it identifies
me and then further searches my name, and I’m barely a public figure, if at all.
Given ever more refined surveillance, what might the world look like if we
were to try to “get over” the loss of this privacy? Two very different
extrapolations might allow us to glimpse some of the consequences of our
privacy choices (or lack thereof ) that are taking shape even today.
***
A DV E RT I S E M E N T
FIND YOURS
In one plausible future, many people routinely are offered, and use, technical
tools to keep their identities obscure. Call it Pseudoworld. When controlling
what is known about us is difficult, the natural path is pseudonymization:
establishing online presence without using a real name. One recent study
found that the more sensitive a topic is, the less likely people discussing it
online are to use their real names. It recorded about one in five accounts on
English-speaking Twitter as plainly using pseudonyms. In Pseudoworld, that
will be far more common. There, to tweet or blog—or sign on to Facebook—
under a real name will be seen as a puzzlingly risky thing to do. Just as
universities remind students to lock their dorm-room doors, civic education
will teach us how to obscure our identities so we can’t be traced online.
We get to Pseudoworld precisely by trying to take RECOMMENDED READING

individual responsibility for our own privacy. Ten years
ago, Joel Reidenberg, a professor at Fordham Law Welcome to the Age of
School, asked his students to find personal information Privacy Nihilism
IAN BOGOST
online about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia,
whose remarks at a conference had hinted at McNealy-
like skepticism about privacy concerns. Despite having
Why Privacy Policies Are So
no access to obvious sources such as a public Facebook Inscrutable
account, the students were able to produce a 15-page MARCUS MORETTI AND
MICHAEL NAUGHTON
dossier about the justice and his family, including his
home address and his home phone number. Scalia was
not pleased, calling the exercise “an example of perfectly FaceApp Makes Today’s
Privacy Laws Look
legal, abominably poor judgment.”
Antiquated
TIFFANY C. LI
Of course, Reidenberg’s students had gathered the
information as an academic exercise and then moved
along. But the assembly of someone’s personal information can turn into a
“doxxing,” a public outing of once-obscure or concealed data, which can serve
as the basis for online and offline harassment. The “get over it” theory of zero
privacy serves to blame the victims of doxxing, suggesting that if they didn’t
want the information getting out, they should not have so cavalierly shared it.
Tracking reputation will still be possible in Pseudoworld. People can simply

establish track records under their pen names, and platforms (and other users)
might choose to pay more attention to comments by those whose previous
comments have been deemed constructive or engaging under whatever
standard the platforms want to set. The science-fiction author Orson Scott
Card imagined this in his book Ender’s Game, in which two preternaturally
smart kids pseudonymously accrue great respect through their participation
on global message boards, and from there influence the course of the world.
Appropriate skepticism of the power of the pen aside, there are lots of Twitter
influencers who fit this mold.
Read: A grand bargain to make companies trustworthy.
This drive for pseudonymity won’t stop at the porous borders of the online
world. Recently, Kate Klonick, a professor at St. John’s University Law School,
gave her students an assignment that was the reverse of Reidenberg’s: Instead
of seeing what they could learn about a known person, Klonick’s students
were to observe nearby strangers during spring break and see how many they
could ID. Their results were successful in a way that was shocking but not
surprising; a few snippets of overheard conversation, or a glance at something
such as a luggage tag, were enough to seed a successful search.
As that kind of surveillance grows, catalyzed by free-range viral videos

recorded wherever an embarrassing incident unfolds, coupled with a contest
to name the bad actors and where they work, the demand for pseudonymity
will require more than non-revealing Twitter handles. As yesterday’s locks are
supplemented by today’s networked home-security cams, companies will
market tools for us to secure the manifold ways in which our identities could
leak. Nico Sell (which may or may not be her real name) has led the way:
She’s a digital-security researcher who has worked hard to never be publicly
photographed without wearing sunglasses. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon
have designed special glasses to confuse facial recognition without requiring
shades, and the artist Adam Harvey has pioneered an open tool kit of new
fashions for the same purpose. Next up will be shoe inserts to stymie gait
detection, and the commandeering of Auto-Tune to prevent voice
recognition.
With its new morning routines of adjusting one’s voice disguiser, gait blocker,
and special glasses, Pseudoworld has a lot of clear drawbacks. It requires
personal vigilance to avoid identification, with lingering problems if one’s
mask should slip. It portends daily social interactions that tilt more toward the
configuration of a confessional booth—or a 4chan message board—than an
exchange of pleasantries with a store clerk bearing a name tag, or an earnest
discussion thread on Facebook with each participant’s home town, relatives,
educational history, and favorite book voluntarily one click away.
In Pseudoworld, lots of data mining is still available to companies and

governments. Anonymized data from Fitbits and iPhones can still be used to
determine well ahead of time if, say, Cleveland is particularly restless one
evening—and its people seem to be assembling in protest.
Pseudoworld will happen if the legal frameworks for protecting privacy aren’t
updated. In the absence of public protection, and the presence of bandits,
we’ll procure what private help we can afford to protect ourselves—and
companies will cater to our paranoia. It’s the apotheosis of the internet-as-
Wild-West cliché, one that goes at least as far back as internet-as-information-
superhighway.
But let’s consider Pseudoworld’s near opposite.
***
What if the law were tightened up with more accountability for bad actors in
an attempt to make us feel more comfortable sharing? Or perhaps
Pseudoworld never worked, as the hydraulic pressure of disclosure overcame
all the strategies of resistance? We could end up in Transcriptworld.
Here, Facebook’s real-name requirement will have become near universalized.

Those who can’t or won’t identify themselves will be excluded. But
identification, unlike pseudonymity, won’t be technically burdensome. It will
be built into everything we do. An Uber or Lyft ride will record the ID of the
driver and the passengers through a fingerprint or facial recognition (thanks,
Apple!), along with the exact route they take and at what time. All other cars
will too, especially self-driving ones, with such sensible biometrics as those we
use to unlock our smartphones today. Indeed, identification will be belt-and-
suspender: Even if the car doesn’t record who and where you are, your phone
will, and you’re not giving up your phone. In Transcriptworld, high-profile
privacy cases such as United States v. Jones, in which the police were required
to get a warrant in order to place a tracking device on a vehicle, will be quaint,
because vehicles will already have multiple tracking devices, and acquiring
that information will be as easy as sending a business-records demand to the
relevant companies, such as Apple, Tesla, and Verizon—or smaller and
sketchier startups such as Clearview AI, designed solely to transact in data.
Read: The age of misinformation.
Doxxing someone in Transcriptworld will be even easier than it is today—

Google’s database is hardly shrinking—but here, anyone in the country who
engages in it, or harassment based upon it, will face swift and sure
punishment in a newly energized legal system, especially because the bad
actors’ own anonymity is so hard to maintain. (For those outside the country,
it will be a different story.) And short of law enforcement, Transcriptworld
will allow private platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to enforce
permanent low visibility, or outright bans, for those said to be violating their
terms of service, wherever they may be in the world. It’d be as easy as an
airline banning an unruly (and vaping counts as unruly) passenger for life—
and far less costly to the company.
To get to Transcriptworld from our current time, most alternatives of

anonymity simply need to be removed for most transactions, online and
offline. That could happen, as with the move to Pseudoworld, through
commercial decisions as much as through government action: If identification
can be made even easier, storefronts and social-media platforms might decide
to try to help themselves to it through facial recognition and other
involuntary tools, or require it before serving anyone, especially if identifiable
data collection is part of their business model. Already we see a move in
physical retail spaces toward the rejection of cash as more and more people
have credit cards.
Most people won’t even notice a difference from today, where, in the absence
of hard-to-deploy countermeasures, they’re already this
traceable.Transcriptworld might then sound like an incremental change to
what we have today—indeed, from what we had in 1999—except more bad
actors are held to account. So isn’t it obviously more desirable than the
constant, exhausting shadowboxing of Pseudoworld?
No.
The Transcriptworld that’s emerging is a decoy, a scrim placed over the
complex machinery that slices and dices personal data to multiple ends,
invisible to us. It looks nothing like the world of 1999 where we “already” had
zero privacy.
Surfing a website or using an app may feel like a solitary experience, but as a
duck may coast serenely across a pond while invisibly paddling madly
underneath, as soon as you press something—indeed, merely hover over it—
more computing power is available to instantly scrutinize that single act than
NASA spent sending Apollo 11 to the moon. Data from one place can be
used to inform another. A car-insurance company discovers that “writing in
short concrete sentences, using lists, and arranging to meet friends at a set
time and place, rather than just ‘tonight’” is linked to better driving, and it
can price rates accordingly, by cross-referencing applicants with their social-
media accounts.
In the meantime, a playful quiz may be later used to try to hone specific
political messages for your particular personality. Inferences can be made not
only about you as a person, but about your state of mind at any given
moment. Someone who’s recently quit drinking can be offered a drink—or,
more subtly, shown a compelling drama whose noble characters just so
happen to be hard drinking. Emotionally vulnerable because you lost your job
and just had a fight with your spouse? It might be the perfect—or, for you,
worst—time to offer you a scammy higher-education degree program, or a car
you can’t afford, financed by a payday loan to make you think you can.
Read: Why surveillance is the climate change of the internet.
To be sure, all this can happen in Pseudoworld, too. So what’s really different?
Well, background checks for sensitive jobs will include scrutiny of public and
private behaviors, including seemingly quotidian ones such as liking tweets
about alcohol or using four-letter words. The list of sensitive positions will
grow. And, as a counterpart to Pseudoworld citizens’ development of identity-
hiding technologies, people in Transcriptworld will seek advice and tools to
help shape their behavior so that what’s associated with their identities suits
their later job applications and dating prospects. The best companies—and
governments—in the system will be a step ahead of people earnestly but still
clumsily presenting themselves as different than they are.
Thus Transcriptworld may appear normal, but it’s really the Truman Show, a
highly realistic but still completely tailored video game where nothing
happens by chance. It’s a hall of mirrors whose horizons and features are
digitally generated and honed for each person, in which even what constitutes
“normal” is defined by the system: both in the type of world— violent or
peaceful, pessimistic or hopeful—that’s presented, and in the ways that people
will rapidly adjust to try to avoid the penalties of the system’s definition of
negative behavior.
Transcriptworld is a lousy place even assuming, as we have so far, that

government’s primary role there is to make sure that people don’t doxx and
harass one another. And when government doesn’t embrace the rule of law,
Transcriptworld provides the soil—fertilized by commercial data processing—
in which to grow the authoritarian nightmares we’ve come to call Orwellian.
There have to be better alternatives than these. To find them, we must

overcome the learned helplessness about the state of our privacy—a
helplessness often abetted by technology leaders moving fast and breaking
things. Privacy defenders have perhaps inadvertently encouraged the same
sense of inevitability by speaking in generic apocalyptic terms. But this fight is
not simply about keeping particular facts about people out of the public eye.
Privacy now is as much about freedom, the freedom to maintain a boundary
between ourselves and those who want to shape us.
We’ll need a combination of old-fashioned political pressure to situate and

vindicate privacy rights in law, limiting data collection and use, and the
forging of new technical tools to make compliance with that law easier.
Restrictions on collection and use of data can bring up short the current race
to the bottom, and a follow-on slide toward the paranoia of Pseudoworld. It
should not only be that the lucky few can manage to buy and practice their
way into a semblance of even the reduced privacy we enjoy today. Functional
anonymity is as valuable in commerce as in speech. The burden shouldn’t be
borne by those on whom these technologies are deployed. It must be shared

by those who want to know all about us, and who would further subtly shape
us according to their own imperatives.

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A World Without Privacy Will Revive the Masquerade - The Atlantic 2022-09-07, 8:21 PM

A World Without Privacy Will

FEBRUARY 7, 2020 SHARE

In general, searching by a face to gain a name and then other information is

We get to Pseudoworld precisely by trying to take RECOMMENDED READING

Tracking reputation will still be possible in Pseudoworld. People can simply

Read: A grand bargain to make companies trustworthy.

As that kind of surveillance grows, catalyzed by free-range viral videos

In Pseudoworld, lots of data mining is still available to companies and

But let’s consider Pseudoworld’s near opposite.

Here, Facebook’s real-name requirement will have become near universalized.

Read: The age of misinformation.

Doxxing someone in Transcriptworld will be even easier than it is today—

To get to Transcriptworld from our current time, most alternatives of

The Transcriptworld that’s emerging is a decoy, a scrim placed over the

Read: Why surveillance is the climate change of the internet.

Transcriptworld is a lousy place even assuming, as we have so far, that

There have to be better alternatives than these. To find them, we must

We’ll need a combination of old-fashioned political pressure to situate and

borne by those on whom these technologies are deployed. It must be shared

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