accounting for privacy - it is better to have poor privacy than no privacy
Who am I to even mention privacy
when I am spreading my innards on a page to post to the world. I am Kenth. I
became Kenth when I purchased a copy of my birth certificate and saw it right
there on the page, Kenth. I don’t know why I went the 55 years going by Kenneth
as is what my parents called me. So funny that, family never caught on to the
typo. It would have been a totally different youth for me to have been
Kenth.
There is a little known fact about me.
I sit to write. I am writing for
a completely contrived audience. If there was anybody here, I would be
speaking. Only those who cannot speak would need to write in that scenario.
What have I to say? What is on my mind that is made of words that I can express
onto this page? As with most blabber there is a need to communicate but I have
none and I only write for exercise.
Will there ever come a day when
surveillance is so thorough that we cannot even be seen without the camera
seeing into our brains and our intentions. What of it, as many would say, I
have nothing to hide. Oh that’s it then, only need of privacy is when there is
something to hide? And what is there to hide, right? Those cameras are only our
government trying to protect us, right. Maybe not only the elected ones but those who govern the policies of the websites we visit.
So there is a (hypothetical)
tribe that lives in the remote forests of northern Ontario who have this fear
of cameras, but they are not important as a statistic actually negligible. Then
there are the criminals which if you work backwards are the reason we needed
cameras in the first place, but they avoid cameras. Are they even cameras? They
record and feed systems which analyse what they term traffic. They can compare
your face across any number of impressions they have stored and can plot your
actions and your facial expression and make a prediction on the likelihood of
your next move being one of the pat behaviours previously observed. It works
like this in China: they can stop you before you say that F word.
The culture of surveillance is
not caught on in North America quite so strongly. We need cameras when we
cannot trust. So your saying you have nothing to hide is actually a preference
question. Who gets to post a preference, those who have nothing to hide, or is
it those who innocently go about their day not noticing they are being
watched.
We wear clothes. We cover our
bodies. We find the idea of cameras in washrooms repugnant. My insurance
company informs me I can have a certain discount if I carry my phone with a
special app that can let them know when I am driving erratically and this is
supposed to be a compensation of sorts. Many do it. They have taken the study
of our driving habits and turned it into a discount. But how badly do I need to
drive before the insurance company decides I need higher premiums?
Back to the mykey thing, in the
PS there are those who watch and those who are watched. There is around 300
thousand people in the public service of Canada. Every one of them has a my
key. Nice. You can ask a Public servant to sign their emails with a digital
signature they cannot refuse. Good start, a public servant cannot see their pay
or apply for a job internal to the public service without that my key. At some
point in your career you might be granted the privilege of reading other PS
members performance data. When ever someone in the PS applies for a position in
your organization you can access their stored performance data.
The theory goes that we have to give up some privacy to come out
of our homes, if we have a home. Some call the street their home. They
can be seen on CTV cameras pushing their a shopping carts along the sidewalk,
maybe just walking along talking to an imaginary friend.
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