randolph@cognito.Eng.Sun.COM (Randolph Fritz) (02/06/91)
My last article the how organizations in cyberspace look to us. But how do we appear to the organizations? Returning to my neighborhood library, what does it see of me? Catalog requests (from an unidentified source) Book check-out and -in Book reserves Possibly magazine loans What, let us say, a supermarket sees of us is mostly our credit record and our buying history. A serious search performed by detective agency will show a credit record, some buying information, licenses, a criminal record, a bit of personal material. Quite possibly the NSA or the FBI knows my politics. What is striking about all this is how little control we have over it all, and how very public it all is. Errors can usually only be corrected years after they've appeared in cyberspace and even so, the error will probably continue to propagate; a kind of electronic gossip. And, since there's some much sharing, every organization knows (almost) everything. It's usually the prerogative of businesspeople to conceal their vendors and customer lists, but this prerogative has been taken away from us as private citizens, and small businesses will probably lose it next. We are (in two senses of the word) the subjects of all this vast data collection; it is about us, and it rules our "lives" in cyberspace. We are subjects of this data base in a third, political, sense: the data is used to direct the tools of power which control people's lives. Here in the USA we are very lucky that this power is, for the most part, limited to taxation and city planning. In many parts of the world, such power extends to political party membership, the workplace, and any aspect of your life tyrannical governments see fit to extend it to. But another relation is possible. We could govern so as to place our visibility in that space was under our control (perhaps using a zero-knowlege system) and to create a cybernetic presence for most of us. In such a world, we would retain control over who we dealt with, and be able to negotiate what they did with the information about us. Now, all this is a long way from happenning. The part about "presence" in cyberspace is especially difficult, as it essentially means making computer network access as widespread as the telephone and this is very, very scary to most of us. It's important to stress, too, that new technologies of social power are going to evolve within such a system; abuses will still be possible. What this does do is give us a fighting chance against abuse. Currently, we truly have no defense at all. nd t ou ui R Press T __Randolph Fritz sun!cognito.eng!randolph || randolph@eng.sun.com ou ui Mountain View, California, North America, Earth nd t