Watching the Watcher
Right now I'm sitting at a cafe downtown (one of my favorite activities) right next to an artist who has been sketching in his notebook. I just caught a glimpse and noticed that he's actually been secretly sketching other people in the cafe for the last couple hours! Like an old woman in the corner who is reading her newspaper. And a businessman fiddling with his iPhone. It makes me wonder, is this a violation of their privacy?
From a legal standpoint, obviously not. But from a social norms perspective, I'm willing to bet that most people would feel very uncomfortable knowing that someone has been surreptitiously examining them in minute detail for hours-- even if they've been sitting in public.
It strikes me that this has clear parallels with privacy on the internet. We techies know that this is a "golden age" of web analytics. Which is to say, it is a "dark age" for people's privacy. Using any of a number of software packages, it is trivially easy to surveil your website visitors' every activity-- where they came from, how old they are, where they live, what they buy, who their friends are, etc. Although we techies know it, I don't think most people really know the amount of information that is being collected about them.
Most web businesses would argue that all these practices are quite benign. I'm sure my artist friend in the next seat would have the same defense. But they all miss the point. It's not the profiling that bothers people, it's the secrecy behind which it all takes place. My fellow cafe-goers probably wouldn't mind being sketched, if the artist had explicitly asked them beforehand. Doing it in secret is just creepy.
Those of you gung-ho about data mining will contend that almost every major website out there has a privacy policy that details all of the information they collect about visitors. So really it's not a "secret" activity. Yet I have to ask, who ever reads these things? They tend to be lengthy documents written in impenetrable legal language. They might not be secret, but they are effectively written in a secret language.
What we need are more "human-readable" privacy policies, similar to what Creative Commons has done with their copyright licenses. It could be a simple graphical system that shows, for example, whether the website sells your data, whether your information is visible to other users, whether they store personally-identifiable info, etc. I wonder what the Google homepage would look like in such a world? Would it still look so innocent?
Of course, there's more than a hint of hypocrisy in this blog entry. I am, after all, voyeuristically watching the artist-voyeur. Should I ask him for permission before I click "post"?
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