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Perhaps you saw CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian's report on digital copiers this week. If not, I'll give you the gist:
- Almost every digital copier made since 2002 has a hard drive.
- Digital copiers can store whatever information lands on the glass.
- When your medical doctor, probation officer, or child's school decides to upgrade, that old machine may go up for sale in a warehouse—along with the data contained within.
It's the typical privacy scare story, complete with a brief tutorial for aspiring identity thieves, congressional head wags of concern, and just a touch of xenophobia. But, just as Keteyian incorrectly reported that Dos Palos High School is in Sacramento, California, the story is miles and miles away from the real issue.
The real issue is what researcher Susan B. Barnes calls the Privacy Paradox (not to be confused with Nando Pelusi's "The Privacy Paradox," Psychology Today, November 2007.).
Again and again, studies in cyberpsychology find a profound discrepancy between privacy concerns and actual privacy maintenance.
Our behaviors do not accurately match our anxieties, suggesting that privacy is not as important to us as many folks would like us to believe, nor as important as we tell ourselves. Or perhaps, if you want to take a little leap of logic with me, it suggests that privacy is dead.
Yep. I said it. In fact, I believe that personal privacy has been dead for years. We just refuse to bury it.
If you've been paying any attention to evolutionary psychologists (absurd big boob hypotheses and all) by now you've realized that their theories rely heavily upon analyzing the ancient tribal behavior of human beings. Our ancestors lived in small groups that banded together for the purpose of survival, whether we liked every member of the group or not. Techology met the needs of the time—fire management, shelter, clothing, food acquisition and storage were the major advances of the time. Personal privacy, beyond the confines of our thoughts and emotions, did not exist. Literally and figuratively, we had no choice but to let it all hang out.
After several millenia of being in each other's business, we reached a point where those tribal relationships were no longer needed for survival. Agricultural and architectural technology met those basic needs, allowing a diversification of our roles in "society," a new-fangled idea that supplanted tribalism. Personal pursuits became commonplace, individuations of ideology emerged, and suddenly maintaining personal privacy (imagine being homosexual or atheist in the 13th century) became a survival tool.
And then the 20th century happened. Technology exploded from this period, advancing us (for better or worse) in countless ways. As the history books like to tell the story, technology served a devious purpose: spying on and destroying one another. Privacy was killed for the sake of national security, again and again and again.
As our society shifted its focus from industry to information in the latter half of the 20th century, with post-war trauma and Cold War anxiety still running strong, our desire to resurrect privacy reached its peak.
Therefore, technology from the second half of the 20th century helped us get away from one another—in tightly-sealed personal automobiles, inoculated suburban city design, under a pair of headphones. Digital information, unreadable or invisible to human eyes, gave us a false sense of privacy. Online chat rooms and role-playing games gave us a surrogate for privacy—anonymity.
Technology of the 21st century blows the doors off the whole operation. If technology of the previous fifty years focused on helping humans get away from one another, technology from the last decade has served to reconnect us. Nonymous social networks anchor us to real people, not avatars or simulacra.
From sexting on a smartphone we love more than our mother to sharing our bowel movements on Twitter to voluntarily allowing our every move to be tracked by GPS-enabled devices, we're sharing everything imaginable. We're returning to our ancestral roots, forming digital tribes, and letting it all hang out again. It seems that we're beginning to accept that personal privacy is dead as a doornail, or at minimum, an outdated concept in today's world.
Or perhaps we've just realized that hiding our identity no longer protects us—but sharing our identity with everyone might.
So, I ask you, should we really care that digital copiers are storing your credit card statements (and your office mate's behind) on their hard drives? What would we lose—and gain—by accepting total transparency?
Find me on Twitter: @rondoylewrites
Check out my Blog Salad, my humor blog about design, technology and general geekiness: BlogSaladBlog.com
Copyright Ron S. Doyle.
