Yes

by Feargal Halligan

Created on: December 05, 2007

I'd like to chime in on the other side of this debate by simply offering a rational perspective to the ideas of privacy and safety in modern society: without actually examining the bare bricks of what we are talking about, how can we do anything more than voice a vague worry that something undefined and terrible will happen with our personal details?

What do we mean when we say 'safe', and what kind of misuse are we guarding against?

Nobody would argue - especially in the light of identity theft and fraud related crimes - that your personal details are 'safe' with the government. Any government can only safeguard against determined thieves as well as any private company can. Likewise corruption can affect either institution. We are, after all, dealing with people here;

Any security system or encryption can be overcome with a given level of knowhow. Having ones details voluntarily stored in a banking system makes them just as vulnerable to attack as having them accrue in some government transaction record. It would appear that either there is no such thing as 'safe' for private information, stored in any form, or else at the very least that the concept of 'safe' is pretty relative in the area of tracking finances, work patterns, social security numbers and all that vital stuff.

To some people, information is money. And if you leave a trail of money behind you, you know people are gonna start following you and picking it up.

So what do you do, in the information age? Keep your money under your bed, work for food and board, or only process your transactions in code in secure vaults of clearing banks? How do you prevent information building up in these systems, in a situation where its safety can never be guaranteed? Buy a shredder? Change your name?

Plainly put, if we use credit cards, electronic transfer systems, or interact with business as a consumer, we are recorded all the time and that information just lies about the place, building up. Anyone who takes a strong mind to can start picking it up and building a picture of us. We have to stop panicking about this simple situation and look at it clearly.

We have to have perspective on this: it applies to everything. If we walk to work, get coffee and lunch and walk home again, there's always the chance that someone will notice us paying for lunch, and follow us home. From there, they can start building a picture of us, going through our trash... my point is that 'safe' is a relative value which goes down the more you choose to do anything, anywhere.

The peculiar thing is thoug, that historically, the obsession with assurances of safety and privacy seems to arrive hot on the heels of the concepts themselves.

Even in the western world, 'privacy' and 'safety' are relatively new ideas. Our society is, after all, only 300 years away from a situation where your landlord rape your wife and then force you to fight in his army at the drop of a hat: our society is only recently evolved from one where we actually had no basic rights at all, and eighty hour weeks were staples. When we think of national service and the draft, scarcely 50 years ago you could be forced to endure mortal danger for your country: the 'safety' and 'privacy' of citizens were very much not guaranteed, and a lot of the world is still like that. Yet now these things are basic rights to obsess over.

It's simply that the idea of these things becoming dramatically less safe or ridiculously available to a ruthless government doesn't seem much of a change to me, basically. While I can acknowledge concern over security and privacy I do feel that the idea of the government using our private details against us has been vastly oversold. Put plainly, if my government starts setting up concentration camps i don't think they'll get me any quicker because they know my medical records or what my mother's maiden name is. I just don't see the cause of panic here. The 'danger' of my government knowing about me if and when I interact with them isn't as imminent to me as it seems to be to others. Should I be more scared?

If we - and we seem to - wish our governments to be more effective and efficient, shouldn't we use this perspective to accept an amount of compromise with regard to how much information gets out there? If we want it done faster and better there has to be bureaucracy. There has to be paper trails and social security numbers, records and job codes. You simply cannot have plasma screen TVs and imported cars and the whole nine yards without it.

And these receipts and invoices have to be put somewhere, it's that simple.

Because it is our own complicity in the transfer of our information that we have to be aware of: in an era where we willingly trade privacy for convenience and ease of use, we have to remember that we are, by using various information systems and transactions methods, allowing private industry and public interests to freely observe our movements on hardware platforms that they have paid for and rented out to us.

In short: while there are dangers inherent in the deliberate gathering of information by governments, our information is no less safe with them than it is anywhere. All the things that we the people want: insurance, medical, roads, cars, licenses, jobs, strip joints and amazon.com - they all have to keep records.

It is very fashionable at the moment to speak about freedom of information and the levels to which government can access information on an individual or private agency: and it can be alarming. Our governments can only make things safe when we cooperate, when we do the work to understand where every inch of information comes from and goes to. Until then, to me it seems like they keep it far safer than under my bed, a lot safer that a bank, and a little bit safer than burying it in a steel chest in my back garden.

People feel that it's dangerous to have information out there, and dramatic topics like CCTV coverage and biometrics passports lead to hushed whispers of '1984' because we don't trust our governments, it's a tradition.

And that's a healthy thing: but every time we fill out a form or lodge an application, we spread the same information trail all over the private sector, which has half the accountability - or less - of our government agencies. If we subscribe to the information age, we pay certain prices with regard to our privacy. But to try and say that our information is any less safe with one agency than with another? That a bank cannot act against us, or a furniture company or private hospital?

This to me sounds to be the same kind of naivete that would suggest that the government cannot be wrong, or act illegally, or consist of ruthless thieves. If you don't trust the government, then either don't interact with them, or find someone that you trust more to interact with. We're supposed to be citizens, not teenagers, huffing and puffing about our parents reading our diaries.

But there is one key difference between private business and our governments, and that's the fact that we can vote and call to account members of our government, and we do not have these powers elsewhere. As slim a power as this may be, we are not yet even close to a totalitarian state, at least not any that I have been in. If we really feel so strongly about these thinsg we have to accept our rolesin changing them. Until then we are just being the worst form of paranoid armchair politicians.

And that's how I see it in the final analysis: our information is not safe but i cannot see when it ever has been or how it's possible to make it more so. Everyone that we interact with records this information, but only government can be taken to account for it. And so by this infinitesimally tiny sliver of accountability, in fact we're safer with the government than by any means I can think of. Even buried in my back garden.

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