Eyes Wide Open

Frontline’s two-part series, “The United States of Secrets,” was quite an eye-opener. For many of us, perhaps, our eyes were already open a crack, thanks to Edward Snowden. But the program added some length to the toothpicks.

If you’re like me, you probably had it in the back of your mind, at least, that the NSA and many large tech companies knew everything about you based on your behavior online or on mobile, but thanks to the whistle-blowers (of whom Snowden is the most famous in a rather long line), now you know the extent of it.

Now we have to decide how much it bothers us, and what we’re going to do about it as individuals. Because it doesn’t bother everyone equally. You may insist that the practice of storing your data stop, on principle, but that’s probably not going to happen, at least for quite a while. So the only thing left that you control is your own behavior. Are you willing to drop out and disconnect? Again, probably not. But at least now, you can’t say you don’t know what the price of living in the modern world is. And in the end, if it doesn’t change your daily life, you may actually make peace with it.

If not, are there enough of us out here so outraged by what we have learned that we are willing to put our vote where our anger is and elect those who would forbid these practices? To be honest, if Barack Obama were running for a third term, I don’t know if I’d vote for him again. A big part of his platform was transparency, but it seems there’s even less of it in government now than there was under W. His director of national intelligence lied to Congress about the extent of data collection. It wasn’t prevarication, or dissembling, or misleading – it was a LIE.

OK, so are we safer for what’s been going on, now that we know about it? Is 9/11 going to be our last Pearl Harbor? What major attacks have been broken up, thanks to the Program? Well, of course, they won’t tell us that (I’m almost ready to shout, “So at least make something UP!”).

As for search engines and other information companies, are there any out there promising NOT to collect our data, that can perform as well as Google or the other biggies? That we might even have to pay for to use?

Mr. Snowden et al have done their jobs. Now it’s down to us.

The Privacy Horse Has Left the Barn

Google’s new privacy policy takes effect today, and the way I understand it, Google will now combine information gleaned from the users of its products into coherent profiles. These are to be used to create better targets for advertisers – and make Google more money. Allegedly, Google isn’t interested in collecting the info on the user as a person, only as an advertising target.

I typically take offense at companies like these imposing changes on users without their consent, where the only escape is to disconnect from the service. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sworn up and down that I would pull the plug on Facebook, as an example. But these services are provided for free – meaning, they don’t charge us money, but they collect information on us.

We Americans have libertarian (with a small L) instincts in our DNA. We think we’re in control of stuff that we don’t control at all. Most of us like capitalism (with a little C), whereby we can start with nothing and become zillionaires through imagination, gumption, persistence and fair play (at least in theory). But God deliver any entity that charges us for something we’ve been accustomed to getting for “free.”

As one commentator put it today, we users of services like Google and Facebook think we’re the consumers, but actually, we’re just the product that these services make available to advertisers. As the services improve what they sell to advertisers, we pay a higher and higher price in the form of incremental losses in privacy. It might be more straightforward if Google would calculate how much it costs for us to use the service and give us an option between surrender and pulling the plug: paying cash in return for not creating our profiles. But so far, that’s not a choice we have.

The real problem is that we can’t have all this modern connectedness and privacy at the same time – they’re virtually antithetical concepts now. If we want real privacy, we can stay off the Internet, turn off our smart phones and move to the most sparsely populated county in Idaho. Oh, and we can’t forget to cut up all those credit and debit cards. It would also help if we gave up our driver’s licenses and stopped voting. In the measure that we withdraw from the world, we reduce our exposure to exploitation, the same way minimizing face-to-face contact with others protects us from contagious disease.

But as I’ve often said, the privacy horse – with us on it -- left the barn long ago. The most we can do right now is keep track of where it’s going, and if we don’t like it, dismount.