Is Anything Private? Will Anything Be Private? Does Anybody Care?

In a column this weekend [also in Sunday’s DPP] Leonard Pitts, jr. ponders about the threats to personal privacy that modern technology is making possible.

He notes that while there was once only fingerprint data being banked and to which few people objected and recently we have seen the beginning of DNA databases, there are now ways of collecting and cataloging information on palm prints, eye configuration, scars, and tattoos.

He quotes Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Project, as noting

"It's the beginning of the surveillance society where you can be tracked anywhere, any time and all your movements, and eventually all your activities will be tracked and noted and correlated.

Pitts concludes,

“Now the FBI proposes to collect and collate still more personal information. It swears that information will be protected, will be used only to ferret out criminals. And it's hard to argue with that: Who doesn't want law enforcement to have every available tool for smoking out criminals?
“But I can't help a certain wariness when I consider the ease with which the program could expand far beyond that mission. As Steinhardt sees it, first criminals, then job applicants and then, ‘Eventually, it's going to be everybody.’
I admit, he might be wrong. But you know something? He might not.”

This goes along with what I have suggested in other forums. With all that is out there, not only these biometric things, but all the photographs taken of us collectively, the small minority of which we actually pose for, increasing coordination of medical records, and the likelihood of increased security steps taken to get onto an airplane or bus or into an arena, or even into public places to which one has been summoned or subpoenaed, and GPS indicators on our vehicles [which due to concerns over fighting drunk driving] will likely soon be equipped with some kind of personal identification of whose driving, what about our lives will actually be private?

I still think that we are only one or two air safety threats from having to undress before we get onto airplanes. [If your mind is in the wrong place, calm down! I do not mean that we are all going to fly naked, at least at first. I am just suggesting that we will all have to remove our own clothes and board planes in some kind of government- or airline-issued robe while our clothes are scanned and searched and kept for secure for our own security. And we hope that they don’t lose them in transit and that the robes fit better than hospital gowns.]

And I really believe that before any of my nieces is a grandmother, that babies will all have some kind of chip implanted in their bodies at birth. It might be a chip which sends a signal, a personal GPS thing, or the government might decide to go for a more moderate read-only thing to sway society more gently.

These personal privacy losses seem ominous. But they won’t come all at once and each will seem a good idea at the time. We already have the security cams wherever we go, cars equipped with GPS for systems like OnStar whether we use them or not, extensive screening at airlines, chips placed in Alzheimer’s patients so they won’t wander far, fingerprinting of children in case they are kidnapped, personal picture ID photos for many jobs for company security, buyer-preference cards [e.g., SuperAmerica Speedy Rewards] which, along with credit cards profile a lot of people’s spending habits, and who knows what tracks us when we are online.

Not only can all these data be collected, but they can be changed, either by mistake or intent, and there likely will be no way of knowing so until something wrong has happened to us. Identities are stolen almost routinely these days. And anybody who saw Forrest Gump shake hands with JFK and show his butt to LBJ knows that photos, even moving pictures, could be manipulated even in the last century.

I am afraid that I am only able to raise these questions and am not able to offer any answers.
There may be one consolation on this. It is not enough to override these concerns, but it does occur to me that if all of these kind of data are collected and enough people are seeing them, and that we are all subject to some kind of embarrassment that maybe we will all learn to be a little more tolerant of each other’s differences and histories. Of course, if people then decide to glory in some of this, then we be forced to ask whether there is any shame left.