In ‘private’ online forums, at malls, and even at home, Julia Angwin reports, someone is tracking you.
Sharon and Bilal couldn’t
be more different. Sharon Gill is a 42-year-old single mother who lives
in a small town in southern Arkansas. She ekes out a living trolling
for treasures at yard sales and selling them at a flea market. Bilal
Ahmed, 36, is a single, Rutgers-educated man who lives in a penthouse in
Sydney, Australia. He runs a chain of convenience stores.
Although they have never met in person,
they became close friends on a password-protected online forum for
patients struggling with mental health issues. Sharon was trying to wean
herself from anti-depressant medications. Bilal had just lost his
mother and was suffering from anxiety and depression.
From their far corners of the world, they
were able to cheer each other up in their darkest hours. Sharon turned
to Bilal because she felt she couldn’t confide in her closest relatives
and neighbors. “I live in a small town,” Sharon told me. “I don’t want
to be judged on this mental illness.”
But in 2010, Sharon and Bilal were horrified to discover they were being watched on their private social network.
It started with a break-in. On May 7,
2010, PatientsLikeMe noticed unusual activity on the “Mood” forum where
Sharon and Bilal hung out. A new member of the site, using sophisticated
software, was attempting to “scrape,” or copy, every single message off
PatientsLikeMe’s private “Mood” and “Multiple Sclerosis” forums.
PatientsLikeMe managed to block and
identify the intruder: It was the Nielsen Co., the media-research firm.
Nielsen monitors online “buzz” for its clients, including drugmakers. On
May 18, PatientsLikeMe sent a cease-and-desist letter to Nielsen and
notified its members of the break-in.
But there was a twist. PatientsLikeMe
used the opportunity to inform members of the fine print they may not
have noticed when they signed up. The website was also selling data
about its members to pharmaceutical and other companies.
The news was a double betrayal for Sharon
and Bilal. Not only had an intruder been monitoring them, but so was
the very place that they considered to be a safe space.
Even worse, none of it was necessarily
illegal. Nielsen was operating in a gray area of the law even as it
violated the terms of service at PatientsLikeMe. And it was entirely
legal for PatientsLikeMe to disclose to its members in its fine print
that it would sweep up all their information and sell it.
We are living in
a Dragnet Nation—a world of indiscriminate tracking where institutions
are stockpiling data about individuals at an unprecedented pace. The
rise of indiscriminate tracking is powered by the same forces that have
brought us the technology we love so much—powerful computing on our
desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
Before computers were commonplace, it was
expensive and difficult to track individuals.
Governments kept records
only of occasions, such as birth, marriage, property ownership, and
death. Companies kept records when a customer bought something and
filled out a warranty card or joined a loyalty club. But technology has
made it cheap and easy for institutions of all kinds to keep records
about almost every moment of our lives.
The combination of massive computing
power, smaller and smaller devices, and cheap storage has enabled a huge
increase in indiscriminate tracking of personal data. The trackers
include many of the institutions that are supposed to be on our side,
such as the government and the companies with which we do business.
Of course, the largest of the dragnets
appear to be those operated by the U.S. government. In addition to its
scooping up vast amounts of foreign communications, the National
Security Agency is also scooping up Americans’ phone calling records and
Internet traffic, according to documents revealed in 2013 by the former
NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Meanwhile, commercial dragnets are
blossoming. AT&T and Verizon are selling information about the
location of their cellphone customers, albeit without identifying them
by name. Mall owners have started using technology to track shoppers
based on the signals emitted by the cellphones in their pockets.
Retailers such as Whole Foods have used digital signs that are actually
facial recognition scanners.
Online, hundreds of advertisers and data
brokers are watching as you browse the Web. Looking up “blood sugar”
could tag you as a possible diabetic by companies that profile people
based on their medical condition and then provide drug companies and
insurers access to that information. Searching for a bra could trigger
an instant bidding war among lingerie advertisers at one of the many
online auction houses.
In 2009, 15-year-old high school student Blake Robbins was confronted by an assistant
principal who claimed she had evidence that he was engaging in “improper
behavior in his home.” It turned out that his school had installed
spying software on the laptops that it issued to the school’s 2,300
students. The school’s technicians had activated software on some of the
laptops that could snap photos using the webcam. Blake’s webcam
captured him holding pill-shaped objects. Blake and his family said they
were Mike and Ike candies. The assistant principal believed they were
drugs.
Blake’s family sued the district for
violating their son’s privacy. The school said the software had been
installed to allow technicians to locate the computers in case of theft.
However, the school did not notify students of the software’s
existence, nor did it set up guidelines for when the technical staff
could operate the cameras.
An internal investigation revealed that
the cameras had been activated on more than 40 laptops and captured more
than 65,000 images. Some students were photographed thousands of times,
including when they were partially undressed and sleeping. The school
board later banned the school’s use of cameras to surveil students.
On April 5, 2011, John Gass picked up his
mail in Needham, Mass., and was surprised to find a letter stating that
his driver’s license had been revoked. “I was just blindsided,” John
said.
John is a municipal worker—he repairs
boilers for the town of Needham. Without a driver’s license, he could
not do his job. He called the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles
and was instructed to appear at a hearing and bring documentation of his
identity. They wouldn’t tell him why his license was revoked.
When John showed up for his hearing, he
learned that the RMV had begun using facial recognition software to
search for identity fraud. The software compared license photos to
identify people who might have applied for multiple licenses under
aliases. The software had flagged him and another man as having similar
photos and had required them to prove their identities.
John was a victim of what I call the
“police lineup”—dragnets that allow the police to treat everyone as a
suspect. This overturns our traditional view that our legal system
treats us as “innocent until proven guilty.”
The most obvious example of this is
airport body scanners. The scanners conduct the most intrusive of
searches—allowing the viewer to peer beneath a person’s clothes—without
any suspicion that the person being scanned is a criminal. In fact, the
burden is on the individual to “prove” his or her innocence, by passing
through the scanner without displaying any suspicious items.
John Gass luckily was given a chance to
plead his case. But it was an absurd case. He was presented with a photo
of himself from 13 years ago.
“It doesn’t look like you,” the officer said.
“Of course it doesn’t,” John said. “It’s 13 years later. I was a hundred pounds lighter.”
John presented his passport and his birth certificate, and his license was reinstated. But the officers wouldn’t give him any paperwork to prove that it was reinstated. He wanted a piece of paper to show his boss that he was okay to drive again.
John filed a lawsuit against the RMV,
claiming that he had been denied his constitutionally protected right to
due process. The RMV argued that he had been given a window of
opportunity to dispute the revocation because the letter had been mailed
on March 24 and the license wasn’t revoked until April 1. John didn’t
pick up his mail until April 5. The Suffolk County Superior Court
granted the RMV’s motion to dismiss. Gass appealed, but the appellate
court also ruled against him.
John felt betrayed by the whole process.
He now is very careful around state police because he worries that he
won’t be treated fairly. “There are no checks and balances,” he said.
“It is only natural humans are going to make mistakes. But there is
absolutely no oversight.
These stories illustrate a simple truth: Information is power. Anyone who holds a vast amount of information about us has power over us.
At first, the information age promised
to empower individuals with access to previously hidden information. We
could comparison shop across the world for the best price, for the best
bit of knowledge, for people who shared our views.
But now the balance of power is
shifting, and large institutions—both governments and corporations—are
gaining the upper hand in the information wars, by tracking vast
quantities of information about mundane aspects of our lives.
Now we are learning that people who hold
our data can subject us to embarrassment, or drain our pocketbooks, or
accuse us of criminal behavior. This knowledge could, in turn, create a
culture of fear.
Consider Sharon and Bilal. Once they
learned they were being monitored on PatientsLikeMe, Sharon and Bilal
retreated from the Internet. Bilal deleted his posts from the forum. He
took down the drug dosage history that he had uploaded onto the site.
Sharon stopped using the Internet altogether and doesn’t allow her son
to use it without supervision.
They started talking by phone but missed
the online connections they had forged on PatientsLikeMe. “I haven’t
found a replacement,” Sharon said. Bilal agreed: “The people on PLM
really know how it feels.”
But neither of them could tolerate the
fear of surveillance. Sharon said she just couldn’t live with the
uncertainty of “not knowing if every keystroke I’m making is going to
some other company,” she said. Bilal added, “I just feel that the trust
was broken.”
Sharon and Bilal’s experience is a
reminder that for all its technological pyrotechnics, the glory of the
digital age has always been profoundly human. Technology allows us to
find people who share our inner thoughts, to realize we’re not alone.
But technology also allows others to spy on us, causing us to pull back
from digital intimacy.
When people ask me why I care about
privacy, I always return to the simple thought that I want there to be
safe, private spaces in the world for Sharon and Bilal, for myself, for
my children, for everybody. I want there to be room in the digital world
for letters sealed with hot wax. Must we always be writing postcards
that can—and will—be read by anyone along the way?
As seen in The Week, excerpted from Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin. Published in February 2014 by Times Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. ©2014 by Julia Angwin. All rights reserved.
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