[comp.org.eff.talk] Ghosts in the City of Mind

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