I watched this TED talk the other day. Brilliant talk (aren't they all? If I had my way I'd quit school and live off of these), and it brought up a very interesting point. The video showcases how one man politely asks his cell phone company for the information they had on file for him. By politely, I mean call them incessantly, and then file a lawsuit against them. Whatever you need to do, I suppose.
They eventually released a huge, truly gargantuan file with everyone he's called for the last few months -- where and when.
There's definitely a gray area here.
When you register for a service, you typically give them certain rights as outlined in their EULA. One, very often, they store a file on you. This is fairly common practice. Do you have a Facebook account? An eBay account? Amazon? It's all the same. And it makes perfect sense to; it's basic system infrastructure. Two, they use that information to synthesize other, related concepts. Netflix uses an algorithm that recommends movies to you based on those you rated highly.
That's honestly all Mr. Spitz's cell phone company did. Heck, it didn't even do the second part. But after graphing the data himself, he found out that there was enough information to completely track every aspect of his daily routine.
They aren't breaking laws. There aren't any protections against this sort of thing (are there? Feel free to correct me). It's just that cell phones have become ubiquitous enough that they're now part of everyday life, and therefore information that's required for just managing your cell phone can now be used to piece together your life.
But how long can this policy last? When Google Fiber was released, a pallid fear appeared over the faces of all the techies of the nation. They're serving Internet now? My god, they're taking over the world!
Thirty years ago, that idea would've been ludicrous. The idea that an entity (a private enterprise, no less!) would become so incredibly ubiquitous that the mere task of managing themselves as a company would double as an intrusion of privacy over all of its users. The idea that we'd become so unbearably reliant on communication systems that they bleed over into personal circles of thought.
Times have changed exponentially. And, if the trend holds steady, then somewhere along the lines we'll need laws for this. Personal information stored en masse is not only creepy but downright dangerous; a cybercriminal that compromises the security of a single phone model could gain some incredibly potent data. But not now, not yet. When the time comes.
The real question here is, where do you draw the line?
No comments:
Post a Comment