The Internet: Watching commercial surveillance

At the rate citizens are moving from conventional mail to electronic mail, texting, and instant messaging, it is reasonable to assume Internet correspondence will supplant postal mail as the dominant medium for sending and receiving correspondence.

Given this trend, by calling our correspondence “email” instead of “mail,” and using a salutation of “Hi” instead of “Dear,” does that relinquish citizens’ rights to seclusion from the world’s eyes? Why should this private space to ourselves and with those whom we exchange messages suddenly become space for everyone to examine?

By changing the delivery mechanism for our message — from the postal service to the Internet — our envelopes can be opened and our letters read. Not just by Uncle Sam’s NSA or FBI (who now claim they examine only metadata, unless in possession of a court order). Not just by Google. Eventually, by anyone. Google itself has stated it has read user content.

(For clarification, I exclude the social media databases in this discussion. Anything we place on Facebook, YouTube, and similar websites is fair game for anyone to use: That is the price paid for telling the world about ourselves. In a nutshell, we asked for it.)

Fortunately, we learned in this series that we can protect our privacy by encrypting our content. But that does not include having our lives involuntarily exposed through online government and commercial files.

The last question: What has happened, in only 30 years or so, for our society to reach a point in which the chief executive officer of Google states:

...after privacy concerns were raised...Eric Schmidt declared: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

I place Mr. Schmidt’s quote in bold type because his assertion reflects an Orwellian mentality. Eric Schmidt is the head of the most powerful and influential Internet-based company on Earth. He implies nothing is out of bounds to be examined: Your letter to your siblings about your parents’ failing health; your debate with the IRS about your taxes; a credit card transaction; your “Dear Joan” to Joan or Joan’s “Dear John” to you. And for what purpose does Mr. Schmidt use this information? Among others: targeted advertisements! Our personal and professional lives have become input into a digital Madison Avenue.

According to Schmidt, the Internet has altered the game. Cyberspace, because it is no longer a pen-and-ink world, renders our right to privacy irrelevant. After all, we have nothing to hide. Nothing to hide except one of the most treasured aspects of human nature: privacy, the right to be left alone.

I have one piece of advice for Mr. Schmidt: Don’t forget to take off your Google glasses when you are having sex. After all, you have nothing to hide as those packets displaying your sexual exploits find their way into the Internet.

Data Brokers

The Internet has become so commercialized that companies exist for the sole purpose of mining databases, such as government files and social media. These organizations apply bigmeta technology to that information, and sell it to others. One company states it has collected 1.1 billion “cookies.” It is information that shows a user’s browsing preferences. It is metadata that reveals much about the habits and behavior of a person or organization. This company also states it has more than 200 million mobile phone metadata records.

Let us all take a bow! You and I are the source of those Internet companies’ wealth.

Opening Envelopes

In an ideal environment for the end-users, after an Internet packet is assembled at the sender’s device and sent, the user data will remain hidden to all devices, servers, routers, tablets, phones, people — everything and everyone — except the end-receiver(s) of the traffic.

Yet our traffic may not be subject to this level of privacy. As the slang goes, here’s the rub: Digital data is just too easy to examine, almost effortless. Congress fell behind the power curve to curb this privacy invasion, so private enterprise started (a) examining and storing the metadata entries on the envelope (an Internet packet), and in some situations, (b) began examining (inside the envelope) the contents of the end-user traffic.

Before long, these organizations came to base their raison d’être for having access to users’ Internet traffic. We can at least bask in the knowledge that our data has made a lot of Internet vendors very wealthy.

Is Privacy Important?

Should we care? Do we harbor something in our lives that must be hidden from others? After all, with the opening of everyone’s digital envelopes, the terrorist, the drug dealer, the pedophile, and other misfits of the world might be exposed. Their baring, their uncovering, will be for the betterment of society. Besides, we are clean of sin and crime. Take pictures of our homes. Read our mail. Tag our phone number to our personal names, to the street where we live.

In closing this part of the series, I hope readers will rally to the idea that privacy is a human sanctity. Without it, we lose a vital part of who we are.

I have had numerous discussions with friends and colleagues who inform me that I should not use the Internet for sensitive correspondence. I do not consider accessing my bank online to enquire about my balances to be sensitive correspondence. Nor do I think my doctor should be hesitant in sending me a text about the results of my PSA test.

On and on we could go, but my single answer to my critics is a question, “Fine, but what happens when the only way to correspond with my bank or doctor is electronically?” Conventional mail will go the way of the telegraph. It is only a matter of time. What then?

Uyless Black is an award-winning author who has written 40 books on a variety of subjects. His latest book is titled “2084 and Beyond,” a work on the origins and consequences of human aggression. He resides in Coeur d’Alene.