Twenty years ago, as the commercial internet took form, the web’s default setting was switched to “surveillance” when it might have been switched to “privacy.” As is often the case with defaults, no one much noticed at the time. Today, with the Silicon Valley surveillance complex set to expand further through the Internet of Things, we have another opportunity to think carefully about digital surveillance and its consequences for how we live. That opportunity, as I argue in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, probably won’t be open for long. A new default setting is about to be established.
“Americans live their lives on their phones now.” So wrote 15 prominent technology companies, including Google, Facebook, Amazon and Snapchat, in a legal brief supporting Apple in its now-moot fight with the Justice Department over unlocking the San Bernardino killer’s iPhone. Our phones have become “an extension of our memories,” the companies argued, and “to access someone’s cellphone is to access their innermost thoughts and their most private affairs.”
Although the companies are right, their earnest defense of privacy is deeply ironic, if not hypocritical. They are, after all, in the business of surveillance. They collect personal data on a scale that would make most law enforcement agencies blush. The very existence of firms like Google and Facebook hinges on their ability to monitor our innermost thoughts and our most intimate affairs, to tap into our digital memory pretty much continuously. . . .
Image: JLS Photography.