Digital Privacy

Most people are concerned about privacy in the digital age, where everything and anything that we do will be recorded by a computer somewhere. I heard a radio ad where a man was ordering a pizza, and the pizza company knew everything about the man's life, including some pretty personal stuff. That's not what's going to happen.

The way privacy will work in the future is that there will be a place where your data is stored. It will be a Fort Knox of data, with as much security as can possibly be put in place, both physical and electronic. Let's call it Fort Data.

Fort Data is set up such that you can let certain people record data about you. You'll let medical records be updated by your doctor. You'll let the phone company put phone call information into Fort Data. The pizza guys can even put a description of your favorite pie in there.

Sounds like a recipe for disaster, huh? Now the pizza guys can go in and look at your medical records, right? Nope. Just as you control who can put what data INTO the records, you also control who can pull what data OUT of the records. Not only that, but you can have very close control over what they have access to.

For example, your medical records can be put into Fort Data with nauseating detail. When you want to fly on an airline, they may be legally required or just demand that you not have any communicable diseases. Instead of their screening software looking at all of your medical records, finding out that you have a bad heart or incontinence, all they can ask of Fort Knox is: Does this person have any communicable diseases? That's it. They can't find out what they are, how many there might be, or anything else. Just whether or not you have at least one.

So too, when you order your pizza, you decide what information the pizza company can find out about you. When you go to their web site, it may have a button to click to let them know your favorite pizza (taken from Fort Data), and there may be another button to let them know your home address when you say you want the pizza delivered. Of course, there will be a button to pay, but the pizza company doesn't need to know who the funds are coming from. All that needs to happen is that money has to appear in the pizza company's accounts. That happens because Fort Data does the transfer from your accounts to their accounts. If you pick up the pizza, all they get to see is you showing up to say that you get pizza #8816. It needn't be so sterile, but if you're worried about your privacy, you can avoid letting the pizza guys know anything about you, except what pizza you want.

Remember here that Fort Data did the transfer of funds so you could have your pizza. Fort Data remembers that. It remembers everything that you do. When you want to find out how much you've spent on pizza over the last year, you just ask. It knows that. When you want to see a chart of your cholesterol over time, it can show that to you because you've been visiting the doctor regularly and he's been updating your cholesterol level after each visit.

This all means that you have access to whatever data you want, that other people can put information into Fort Data when you say they can, and other people can pull information out when you say they can - and what they pull out can be really limited.

Another simple example is that you are a student at the local university and you want to go into the library. The library is only for use by university students. You wave your Fort Data identity card at the reader on the building to try to get in. The reader asks Fort Data if you are a university student. Fort Data says that you are, and the reader unlocks the door for you.

The reader only learned that you were a university student. It didn't learn your name, your address, your dorm, your grade point average, nothing. Just if you were a student, because that's all it needed to know.

Now comes the touchy part: law enforcement. Because people are not always good citizens, somebody has to be able to spot the bad ones. The information in Fort Data can be an invaluable resource to be able to do that. When an agent of law enforcement goes to poke around in Fort Data, realize that their actions are being recorded by Fort Data just like anyone else's would be. And law enforcement doesn't get free access. What they can do will be limited by law, just as they are limited now. Search warrants would be needed in order to poke around in an individual's information. Sometimes, searches would be limited to vague requests such as "Did they ever call Bob Jones?". So instead of looking at every phone call made, they would have to stick to questions that they can justify to a judge.

Or to us. Everything that a member of the law enforcement agencies looks at is going to be recorded by Fort Data. If I am being investigated by anyone, I will know it - unless the courts decide that the investigation warrants secrecy. The investigation will be recorded by Fort Data so that ultimately nothing is being done on the sly, but I won't be told that somebody is looking at my data.

So what we end up with is a vast repository of everything that we do, but we are the ultimate controller over our portion of that repository. Others can look at our data in a highly-regulated way, where the only exception is that law enforcement can look at the data subject to the checks and balances of the legal system which is obligated to watch over the members of the law enforcement world.

Oh, by the way, this means that we never fill out another form. If somebody needs information about us and we're okay with it, we permit them to go to Fort Data to get it. And Fort Data records the fact that they got it.

Perhaps the greatest danger will be that we will be asked if we want to let someone know some obscure score that is calculated from our Fort Data information. For example, today we have FICA scores. They tell banks and other lenders how we've been doing on paying our bills and whether we can be trusted with a loan. That's a pretty obscure bit of information, but who can we safely share that number with? We control the decision, but how can we know the implications of sharing it with a real estate agent or our employer?

As more and more stuff is collected in Fort data, we're undoubtedly going to start to see all sorts of calculations and tabulations that companies are going to want to run. A bank that wants to loan you money might want to make some calculation within Fort Data on your data to come up with a number that tells them whether or not to loan you money and at what interest rate. The calculations can all be done by Fort Data itself, such that the bank never sees your financial data. But once that number is calculated, won't other organizations and businesses be interested in it? If they ask to see your Bank of America Financial Score, is it a good idea to let them see it?

Next time, Digital Identification

Bill of Duties Revisited

Fellow blogger John A invited me to respond to the Bill of Rights with a corresponding Bill of Duties. I started to write up some legaleze-sounding gibberish that directly responded to the first two ammendments to the Constitution. As I was explaining the verbage, I quickly realized that I was trying to write something that told people to just behave themselves, for crying out loud.

But what qualifies as good behavior? As a Catholic, the answer popped into my head immediately: the ten Judeo-Christian commandments. A quick check on the web tells me that Islam also adheres to the essential points of the ten commandments. I was happy to see mention of things in the Qur'an such as "Keep one's promises" and "Be honest and fair". Those sorts of things are described in the Judeo-Christian Bible as well, just not as part of the ten commandments. These are our duties as citizens of a community.

If I had responded to the Bill of Rights point by point, I would have established limits on freedoms with the intent of avoiding social damage produced by excessive use of those freedoms. Such statements would originate in a desire to have citizens do no harm. That's known as the Silver Rule: Commit No Harm. A nation with the potential of America must rely on a finer, more demanding metric, the Golden Rule: Do Good Works.

It's not enough to say that what you're doing isn't hurting anyone. You must do things that help the community. A community only operates while its members are committed to the community above themselves. Look to anyone in your community who builds that community and you'll find someone who acts for the improvement of the community. They spend their time on the well-being of the community instead of spending it on themselves. Alas, we were given the Bill of Rights, which emphasized self without an equal or greater emphasis on the health of the community. That encouraged Americans to think in terms of personal freedoms and liberties without a commensurate consideration of the needs of the community.

So if I were making ammendments that were needed to establish a bill of duties, it would include things like telling the truth, respecting others, taking care of one's own health, pursuing one's own maturation, participation in community, etc, etc, etc. All the things that we were taught in kindergarten, before we got so clever and decided to focus on pursuing our civil liberties to extremes.

Ultimately, the founding fathers missed the mark. They believed that people were fundamentally Christian in demeanor, and that liberties could be granted to them without fear of an erosion of the society. Ultimately, society has flexed and twisted so much over the past 200 years that our freedoms have burdened us as terribly as the overbearing rule of a monarch.