Remarks on Internet Privacy

Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) looking for bugs in his San Fransciso apartement — F Coppola’s 1974 “The Conversation”

Quiet! We’re in public…

1. How did private interests come to know everything about us instead of nothing? Mobile phones are bugs we willingly carry around with us every day.
2. What happens on your computer used to be private and what happened on the internet, public. But now everything on your computer is also on the internet.
3. Maybe the greatest challenge to digital privacy is that there’s no phenomenological difference between working with private object (ex: a spreadsheet on your computer) and public objects (ex: a speadsheet on Google Sheets). Meanwhile, our analog bodies provide a wealth of information about what other’s see — whether we’re in an enclosed space, whether there’s a natural light source or drapes are down, the volume we’re speaking at, whether or not we’re clothed, etcetera. We don’t even have to think about privacy in the analog. Our bodies are just tuned to know. What UI tactics can can we employ to distinguish between public and private?
4. The mobile app for networked service is a major driver blurring the public-private boundary. When you download the Twitter app, for example, you’re downloading a portal to a public space. Instead of some social media application having access to your browser, it has access to your local file system. Imagine giving a cafe the keys to your home so that you could sit down there to have a conversation with a friend, family member or business associate.
5. One UI solution might be some sort of border that encircles an icon (a visual representation of a digital object). Say, if the border around an image is green, only users with direct physical access to your computer and user account can access it. If the the border is blue, then it’s networked — some application has access to it. With a simple toggle, you can mark the object public or private.
6. “Free” software is mostly bad because it’s not really free. I wonder when it’s going to be in the interest of “private” citizens to start paying for software again.
7. When I go to the store, the line is served from the front. If it the line were served from the back, I would have to pass my credit card and item to the person ahead of me, and they to the next person, and so on, until it got to the register. After the help runs the card and produces a receipt, they would give it to the first person in line with the item, and begin the process of passing it back to you. Everyone on line gets two chances to see what you bought and how you bought it. That’s how the internet works.
8. Some people want to tell you that your interest in internet privacy is absurd. They’re perspective is usually political. They’re imagining fools who think they can evade the government because they downloaded Signal. It’s main benefit is to protect you from other citizens, in you country or some other. And it’s in many government’s interest to protect that.
9. It’s easy to forget that the internet is a public place. As mentioned above, our bodies aren’t attuned to detecting the difference. And the internet must be public by it’s very definition. American’s act like free speech is threatened when really, if you said some of the shit I see on your Twitter feed in 1955, I would fire you. The internet has become a place where we thought we could abandon notions of class and propriety for good. I guess we were wrong.
10. Being able to say what you want in public without being able to deal with the backlash is posed a free speech issue. I spoke freely, they spoke freely. No problems. But I think this is a different than Twitter blocking the New York Post’s probably true story about Hunter Biden.
11. There are degrees of publicity.
12. Individuals and groups all over the world are recording your sensitive personal data — financial, familial, medical, residential. Your taste in art and movies. The sports you like. If you’re a member of a Twelve-Step group, religious organization, or see a therapist. Your tastes in pornography! Even your romantic interests. They’re recording your sensitive data and they do not have the capacity to protect it.
13. You’re not smarter than a hacker.