Anyone who can watch you will watch you.
In technology, that is one of the big lessons of 2013. The National
Security Agency and who knows who else have been tracking this or
hacking that. China has been breaking into our computers. Google has
been sifting through our home networks. Facebook has been tinkering with
its privacy settings.
No wonder outfits like Snapchat have exploded onto the scene. They
seem to go against the grain, holding out the promise that all those
selfies, texts and emails will simply vanish.
Whisper, an “it” app for teens, supposedly lets people share secrets
anonymously via smartphone. Telegram is being pitched as the adult
version of Snapchat.
But the fact is, many services that claim to offer that rarest of
digital commodities — privacy — don’t really deliver. Read the fine
print.
“Just because information is unavailable to you and you don’t see it
doesn’t mean that it is not being captured, stored, or even seen by
someone else in transit,” said Edward W. Felten, a professor of computer
science and public affairs at Princeton.
Snapchat’s privacy page
explains that private images are stored on someone’s phone — and on its
own servers. “Forensically, even after they are deleted,” Snapchat
says, those images can be retrieved. Whisper’s privacy page
says the company owns the intellectual property, both images and text,
that people post; Whisper reserves the right to sell that stuff to third
parties. And Telegram, while seemingly less innocuous with its claims,
nonetheless leaves out something you might want to know: someone can
just take a screenshot or picture of that “private” conversation.
Even if there are all sorts of technical barriers that the
disappearing messaging services put up there, someone can just take a
picture of the phone,” said Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer with the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization. “If they can see it
with their eyes, they can see it with a camera.”
In most instances, your Internet service provider or cellphone carrier gets to watch over your shoulder with every click.
Even when these messaging apps aren’t tracking your chats, the N.S.A.
and other government agencies are. They’re everywhere. Even people who
play fantasy video games like World of Warcraft are being watched, according to documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden.
Worse, the snooping doesn’t just happen on our desktops and laptops.
In our mobile-centric world, it happens everywhere. Through our mobile
phone, our locations are being corralled and calculated. The N.S.A. can
even figure out who we are with by triangulating phones’ previous
locations.
Don’t have a smartphone yet? They still know where you are and where you’ve been. The American Civil Liberties Union released a report
this year that found that technologies that let governments scan
license plates are being used to build databases of vehicle locations
across the United States.
The N.S.A. didn’t respond to a request for comment, but the argument
by some companies and government groups is that if you’re not doing
anything wrong and have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to worry
about.
Privacy experts strongly disagree. A new book by Harvey Silverglate, a lawyer in Massachusetts, titled “Three Felonies a Day,”
claims the average professional in the United States commits at least
three crimes every day. How? While academics, lawyers and even
government officials don’t actually know how many laws exist in today’s
judicial system, it’s estimated that there are from 10,000 to 300,000 federal regulations that could be enforced criminally.
Mr. Opsahl said we all probably break some of those laws online every
day, too. “There is a tremendous amount of information that is
available about every person online, and the practical ability for
government and private surveillance has never been greater,” he said.
So if you can’t find privacy in a game with trolls and goblins, on a
Sunday drive with your family or inside a messaging app with
disappearing chats, what can you do?
“What’s clear is that tracking technologies have outpaced democratic
controls,” said Ben Wizner , the director of the Speech, Privacy and
Technology Project at the A.C.L.U. “What we’ve learned this year is that
agencies are determined to conduct surveillance on us, and there’s not a
whole lot we can do about it.”
But there is one thing that Mr. Wizner said can and should happen.
Technologists are capable of building tools that can prevent such
snooping — things that go beyond disappearing messaging apps and that
could protect everyone’s privacy.
“This may be one of those once-in-a-generation moments when we
recalibrate the powers of the citizens and the state,” Mr. Wizner said.
“And that change can happen on the technological side, where the
technologists that are disillusioned by the incessant tracking will use
their skills to make surveillance more costly.”
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