I've been up on my hobby horse again about the unregulated world of Big Data and how this is a far greater threat to privacy than anything the NSA is doing. That is for those of us who understand how loss of privacy is the first step to abuse of power, by either multinational corporations or the governments they control. Or both. I think my front page piece from last year pretty much states my views on the topic, but the ACLU writing in HuffPo just blew me away:
A future Internet of Things does have the potential to offer real benefits, but the dark side of that seemingly shiny coin is this: companies will increasingly know all there is to know about you. Most people are already aware that virtually everything a typical person does on the Internet is tracked. In the not-too-distant future, however, real space will be increasingly like cyberspace, thanks to our headlong rush toward that Internet of Things. With the rise of the networked device, what people do in their homes, in their cars, in stores, and within their communities will be monitored and analyzed in ever more intrusive ways by corporations and, by extension, the government.
And one more thing: in cyberspace it is at least theoretically possible to log off. In your own well-wired home, there will be no “opt out.”
The piece goes on to point out that only 1 percent of the objects in the world have an IP address. The goal by these private businesses is to link everything, your toaster, your lamps, your bed, your dishwasher ... to the internet in order to gather data. On everything and everyone.
Please read below the fold for more on this story.
The result: more and more of what happens behind closed doors will be open to scrutiny by parties you would never invite into your home. After all, the Drug Enforcement Administration already subpoenas utility company records to determine if electricity consumption in specific homes is consistent with a marijuana-growing operation. What will come next? Will eating habits collected by smart fridges be repackaged and sold to healthcare or insurance companies as predictors of obesity or other health problems -- and so a reasonable basis for determining premiums? Will smart lights inform drug companies of insomniac owners?
How about your bed informing its manufacturer when you're tossing and turning, just to sell that to the makers of Ambien? Google just bought a company that makes smart smoke detectors so they know when you're burning your food or smoking pot. So then they can send you a subscription deal to
High Times or perhaps sell you some no-stick cookware. All perfectly innocent commercial activity, right? You can be sure all of this will be wrapped in "cool new features!" But the main point is to gather big ass data, an industry that is operating far outside any semblance of public regulation.
Read the whole thing. Especially about the street lamps recently installed at Newark Airport that double as cameras, soon to go national on streets everywhere. All done by private business with little to no regulation.
This isn't privacy just because it's not the government. That's a mockery of what privacy means. Can anybody in their right mind actually call this privacy?
Furthermore, there have been an explosion of companies that simply buy this data and aggregate to sell it to the government. That's what makes the NSA expenditures on data gathering so stupid. They can very easily buy it commercially from the corporations that gather it like everyone else does, including foreign governments. (I'll have more on this later.) Why waste taxpayer money doing what private industry is already doing?
Now I'm no Luddite. I welcome innovation. But I also think there ought to be regulation and laws to protect private life. And as Washington state's attorney general pointed out in a report, the current policy of the government toward Big Data is "self-regulation."
Sorry, but I've never been a believer that any industry can effectively regulate itself. At least not in the public interest. Additionally, if you're worried about government abuse of power because it has access to data like this, then you'd better be concerned with rooting out government abuse of power broadly because that is probably the final step they get to before they find out how brown you like your toast.