Privacy is Dead

The New York Times offers a glimpse into the future:

Pro­pelled by new tech­nolo­gies and the Internet’s steady incur­sion into every nook and cranny of life, col­lec­tive intel­li­gence offers pow­er­ful capa­bil­i­ties, from improv­ing the effi­ciency of adver­tis­ing to giv­ing com­mu­nity groups new ways to organize.

But even its prac­ti­tion­ers acknowl­edge that, if mis­used, col­lec­tive intel­li­gence tools could cre­ate an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of.

Col­lec­tive intel­li­gence could make it pos­si­ble for insur­ance com­pa­nies, for exam­ple, to use behav­ioral data to covertly iden­tify peo­ple suf­fer­ing from a par­tic­u­lar dis­ease and deny them insur­ance cov­er­age. Sim­i­larly, the gov­ern­ment or law enforce­ment agen­cies could iden­tify mem­bers of a protest group by track­ing social net­works revealed by the new tech­nol­ogy. “There are so many uses for this tech­nol­ogy — from mar­ket­ing to war fight­ing — that I can’t imag­ine it not per­vad­ing our lives in just the next few years,” says Steve Stein­berg, a com­puter sci­en­tist who works for an invest­ment firm in New York.

A friend of mine from Boston once put it best: The entire world is now the equiv­a­lent of a small town in which every­one knows — or can know — every­thing about every­one. Choose your online actions carefully.