'Privacy is Theft' and Other Scary Notions from 'The Circle'
A strange thing happened after I finished reading Dave Eggers' new novel, "The Circle." I started seeing things from the book everywhere I looked. And it worried me.
It was as if George Orwell had suddenly risen from the dead to send me terrifying press releases from a future where companies know everything, measure everything, and control everything. Except that future is right now, and those press releases are real, not Orwellian fiction. Just a few examples:
- The NSA is just about to open a gigantic data center in Utah that will store enormous amounts of surveillance data vacuumed up from the Internet. It has some technical problems right now, but it's coming online soon.
- Google's new search algorithm focuses more on the meaning of what you write and on your personal reputation, not on search keywords
- 23andMe encourages you to share your genetic data on Facebook — even though that might not be such a good idea
- Cisco wants to help retailers capture "dark data" on retail shoppers behavior — by tracking them on video surveillance cameras
- Basis Science sells a watch that measures your heart rate, chemical composition of your sweat, motion, and other data — and can upload it to the cloud for analysis — and it just raised a chunk of new funding
- A startup called HireVu wants to make job interviews more efficient by having candidates pitch their skills in HD video clips and by answering multimedia questions, tests, and coding challenges
- Once you've been hired, another startup called Qualtrics has a system for making employee assessment surveys fun and easy, so companies can collect more data on their employees' performance
These are just a few examples of how we're entering an age when "all that happens will be known," in the words of Eggers's creepy, fictional CEO: When everything and anything will be recorded, stored, indexed, and quite possibly shared with millions of others.
Do we really want this?
"The Circle" is set in the near future, perhaps just a year or two from now, and centers on a company, called the Circle, that has the relentlessly sunny social optimism of Facebook, the data voraciousness of Google, and obsessiveness over hardware design and customer lock-in of Apple. And, of course, it's a monopoly, which is the really troubling thing: It has no significant competition.
The first thing you learn about the Circle, from the point of view of a new employee, Mae, who is the novel's protagonist, is that it has a fantastic campus. Young, fresh-faced techies wander the grounds, playing badminton and bowling, eating fresh, local greens in the dining halls, and having parties almost every night. It's like Facebook's and Google's campuses, but even better.
The founders have the same obsession with cutesy misspellings and bizarre intercapitals that most of Silicon Valley does ("TruYou" and "SeeChange" are just two of the product names Eggers invents). And Eggers captures the banality, the passive-aggressiveness, and the strange upbeat quality of Silicon Valley lingo. A meeting between Mae and two concerned HR representatives, who feel that Mae is not participating enough in the company's extracurricular activities and is not sharing enough on their social network, rang particularly true for me.
The book's first 200 pages are pretty banal, but still somehow compelling. Eggers makes us watch as Mae gets a new-employee orientation, work a customer service job, post updates to a social network, and get that extended HR review. If you've ever worked in a tech company or used Facebook, this could be incredibly boring reading for you. Yet somehow Eggers slowly builds a sense of claustrophobia around the scene, as the Circle expands its sensors and its databases to comprise nearly everything.
Halfway through the book, he has Mae — working now with the company's senior leadership — come up with a series of Orwellian slogans:
SECRETS ARE LIES
SHARING IS CARING
PRIVACY IS THEFT
If you are an NSA officer, a senior executive at Google, or a true exhibitionist, you might endorse these slogans. For the rest of us, they're a chilling reminder that the ambitions of tech companies might not square with the way most of humanity prefers to live — even if those ambitions are clothed in the language of service and good fellowship.
That's why I'm glad that no single company yet has the ubiquitous reach of the Circle — though I'm troubled to think that government intelligence agencies might be getting close. In light of that, I'm especially glad that there are alternatives for those of us who value privacy. BitTorrent's recent billboard campaign is an especially good reminder that these companies exist, and that privacy is still an option. May it remain so.
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Partner and Wealth Advisor, Waverly Advisors
11 年I guess the tradeoff between access and privacy has always existed. My biggest issue with the "trend" is that you don't necessarily understand the trade-off up front. You get the access first and then slowly understand what the privacy trade-off was later. If you decide the privacy for access trade is too high and cancel your access, do you ever get the privacy back? With all the news of the "storing" of information it seems unlikely at best
Chairman, President & CEO at Synergism, Inc. and Owner, Synergism, Inc.
11 年Look at all the benefits of transparency ( which does not mean no privacy). I could be rerouted when the traffic is at a stand still so that my rest-of that-day's schedule is unaffected, as just an example. Awareness of everything will lead to lot less strife and individual as well as societal-well-being.Here is something to about that: https://content.yudu.com/Library/A203lm/SocietalMechanicsofA/resources/index.htm?referrerUrl=http%3A%2F%2Ffree.yudu.com%2Fitem%2Fdetails%2F668227%2FSocietal-Mechanics-of-Awareness
focused on #IIoT #digitalization, #smartsolutions, #sustainability, #energytransition
11 年Kate it's crafted seeming incongruity :)
Assistant Professor of Game Design and Development at Purdue Polytechnic Institute
11 年The blog you linked was a nice ad for Bittorrent but had some pretty questionable claims in it. In particular, the claim that it is an artist controlled distribution platform. Exactly how does an artist control the distribution of their creations across bit torrent? what mechanisms are there for the artist to realize a return on their investment of time, effort and creativity? All in all, this claim seem to me to be like claiming that a booster coat is a new way to do retail.
IT Training, Consulting, Staffing, Problem Solving, at Aquifer IT Professionals, LLC
11 年We need to commit to do more random stuff online to play with the big data nabobs. Let's F with GooG and every now and then search on "polkadotted tuxedo wearing hamsters" or Smiley Syrus. Algorithms and BigBrotha don't get irony or humor too well. I don't worry about the govt doing anything intelligent. The money people, another story.