Techdirt Podcast Episode 1: Can You Increase Privacy With More Surveillance… And More Transparency?

from the off-we-go dept

For quite some time we’ve been talking about launching a Techdirt podcast. After a few aborted attempts, we’re finally off and running. This is the first episode, and we’ll be trying to stick to a weekly-ish schedule (no promises). We’ll be posting each episode here on Techdirt, but you can also find it and subscribe to it via Soundcloud and iTunes, or point your podcast player directly to the RSS feed (so what are you waiting for?). As I say in the intro, this is very much an experiment, and we’ll be learning and tweaking as we go (and, yes, we already know that the sound quality needs to be improved — we’re working on it). The plan is to in some ways mimic the Techdirt format with an essay (some might say a rant) up front, followed by a discussion, but with the topic areas to be less news driven, but rather driven by larger ideas/concepts that we think are worth discussing. In this first episode, we’re discussing privacy and surveillance, but coming at it from a different direction than most such discussions. I hope you enjoy it.

Thanks to Dennis Yang and Hersh Reddy for co-hosting with me on this inaugural podcast, and thanks to Dan Bull for supplying the music (I would have mentioned that in the podcast, but we hadn’t figured out the music at the time we recorded). The full text of the opening essay can be read below.

Can You Increase Privacy By Increasing Surveillance?

In 1996, David Brin wrote an article in Wired -- followed two years later by an entire book -- about ?the transparent society.? In it, Brin challenges people to effectively rethink the most common views on ?privacy? as a single monolithic ?thing? to be protected, and actually argues how we might actually better protect overall privacy by doing the very thing that most would quickly assume would decrease privacy: increasing surveillance cameras and technology.

His argument isn?t necessarily that we ought to do that, but rather that whether anyone liked it or not, it was coming. And his prediction from nearly two decades ago was clearly on target: surveillance cameras, both privately owned and by law enforcement, have become increasingly commonplace. Web cams now come standard on just about every computer (you have to work hard to find a computer without a camera). And, of course, in the last few years, we all have massively powerful cameras and recording devices in our pockets in the form of smartphones. And, that?s barely touching on the idea of the internet itself as a giant surveillance machine.

So how could this possibly increase privacy? Brin goes back to the idea of transparency -- taken to a radical level. If, rather than limiting access to what those things record (and what is reviewed) to just those who control the surveillance mechanisms, we open them up to everyone -- suddenly, the ability to abuse that surveillance is limited.

As we recently discovered, thanks to Ed Snowden, the NSA has a term for analysts who spy on love interests -- it?s called LOVINT, a play on the traditional role of the NSA in SIGINT or ?Signals Intelligence.? And, of course, it?s this kind of surveillance that scares people -- when someone with power over the surveillance apparatus spies on another for their own personal gain. But, that becomes significantly less possible -- or rather, less possible to do and get away with it -- when anyone can check in and see what happened.

The traditional question asked on surveillance is ?who watches the watchers? -- but Brin?s suggestion is that we?re all better off if everyone watches the watchers, and are thus watched themselves.

Would an NSA agent be as quick to snoop on a love interest?s phone records if he knew that she would be alerted to the search -- designating him as somewhat creepy?

While some have reflexively pushed back against this idea, in some areas we?re already seeing it happen in (limited) practice with impressive results: police cameras. In this era of militarized police and increasing stories of police brutality and arbitrariness, many police forces have started outfitting all officers with cameras.

The early results are impressive. In Rialto, California, by merely outfitting half of the 54 uniformed patrol officers with body cameras, the police department saw an astounding 88% decline in complaints filed against officers over a one year period (going from 24 complaints the previous year to just 3 when the force wore cameras).

Furthermore, the cameras appeared to act as real deterrents to police abuse: for the officers wearing cameras, every single case of physical contact was started by the public, while in the control group, who weren?t wearing cameras, 24% of the cases were initiated by police.

Other studies have shown similar results.

This is why there?s an increasing push for police body cameras to be used everywhere. Notably, in Ferguson Missouri, it was reported that the police did have dashcams for police cars but they were not installed. Since the events and protests from this summer however, police in Ferguson received a donation of body cameras and have been wearing them for the past couple of months.

There are interesting results to studies in other areas as well. A study by Washington University put bodycams on restaurant employees, showing that the cameras reduced theft by 22% (with the rate of theft decreasing even more over time). Perhaps much more interesting: body cams on restaurant employees increased total check revenue by 7%, drink revenue by 10.5% and tip revenue by a marginal amount.

But, of course, there?s reason to be concerned about that. Feeling ?watched? all the time can also negatively impact productivity. It makes people feel less trusted, and less able to make judgment calls in certain situations for fear of constant second guessing. It goes back to the era of ?Taylorism? in the work place, where certain employers thought they could get more productivity out of workers by monitoring every move. That was discredited, but with the rise of computers and the internet, some of those concepts returned -- with employers monitoring employee internet usage, blocking access to websites and punishing or firing workers who did too much ?personal surfing.?

But, again, this is a situation where you have asymmetric info. It?s a case where the surveillance is done by the powerful and no one is ?watching the watchers.? What if it were more open and such information was shared more widely? Would bosses be a lot less likely to accuse you of spending too much time on Facebook if their own time on Instagram was available for everyone else to see?

Similarly, as more and more companies are going down the road of collecting more and more data -- something that isn?t going to stop, no matter how many times people complain about it -- wouldn?t it be better off if they did so much more transparently, making it clear to everyone what data they were collecting and how it was used? Wouldn?t it both ease the concerns of users who do wonder about potential privacy violations, as well as help to create incentives for those companies to act within social norms?

This isn?t an easy question, and I doubt that there?s a perfect solution, but the fact is that Brin?s predictions from years ago seem to be pretty dead on, and perhaps it?s time we take more seriously his recognition that greater transparency can lead to greater privacy even when there?s greater surveillance...

Filed Under: david brin, podcast, privacy, surveillance, transparency