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The Information Society
Ever get that feeling you're being watched? If you use a search engine, drive a car or even put rubbish in your bin you could be forgiven for feeling slightly paranoid, particularly after reading this morning's papers.
US readers will have already heard of how internet portal AOL made Google searches by hundreds of thousands of its users available online. The Guardian retells the story for British readers, and investigates just how much Google - and anyone who gets their hands on Google's files - can tell about individuals by the searches they conduct. One unfortunate Florida man's frustration at the disintegration of his marriage is tracked by his search strings alone, going from "marriage counseling" to "spy on the wife", "signs of cheating" to "divorce lawyers" and then "kill my wifes mistress" via - probably related - searches for alcohol withdrawl and sexual techniques. A woman's relationship can be followed from signs of first love, a pregnancy scare to visiting laws at the local prison. A church-going lady's requests for information on quilting are punctuated with searches for vibrators.
All human life is here - or was, before AOL pulled the information following complaints that while users were only identified by AOL numbers, internet sleuths could track down or identify users from their searches. The New York Times reportedly did just that, matching an Alabama granny from the information she had entrusted to Google.
But still, all that information - possibly 2.7 billion Google searches in July in America alone - is stored somewhere, along with emails (if you're a Googlemail user) and bank details (if you use Google ads). The Guardian's column adds that routes planned on Google Maps will be recorded and, if you use Google blogging services, that information too will be in Google's memory. And it's not just Google: Other internet services, like Yahoo, store the same information.
Sometime the information is useful for business purposes: The newspaper claims that Amazon is working on systems that will help it profile its 60 million customers by purchases, "income, sexual orientation, religion and ethnicity."
Others retain the information for... well, it's not clear. Some web companies are still working on the principle of a Unifying Theory of Everything, which will allow all the information they have on customers and their desires to be matched with all the world's businesses and service providers, thus generating endless supplies of cash. At this stage, not even Google has the resources to keep tabs on each of its billion users simultaneously - but pulling out individual users for scrutiny, as AOL's botched experiment showed, is remarkably easy.
The column concludes that we should be worried about how western internet companies have compromised their principles to allow the Chinese authorities to censor their services: "But the real power for a totalitarian government is no longer just censorship. It is to allow its citizens to search for anything they want - and then remember it.
"No western government, so far as we know, has gone that far. But if one ever does, it will know where the information is kept that will tell it almost everything about almost everyone."
Western governments might not be sifting through your Google searches yet, but in Britain, they are going through your household rubbish. It was revealed yesterday that half a million wheelie bins have been fitted with microchips which allow the authorities to record the weight of rubbish households throw out each week.
The bin-hoking measures appear to be tied to New Labour plans to tax households according to how much rubbish they produce. Civil liberties groups have reacted warily to the bin chips, while local authorities and think tank close to government believe that variable charging schemes, including "pay as you throw" systems, could tackle British reluctance to recycle.
The civil liberties implications ("Not even the Soviet Union made such an intrusion into people's personal lives", said one Conservative MP) give Stephen Pollard some excellent material. The authorities claim that the bin chips will promote "efficiency", he writes,
"Whenever the justification of ‘efficiency’ is used in justifying a policy, make no mistake that there is always a hidden agenda. To government, all individual behaviour is a hindrance to the smooth running of bureaucracy. Things would run far more ‘efficiently’ if we acted precisely as we were instructed by officials who know best."
Pollard adds that the surveillance is part of a planned drive for a new tax on rubbish. But, as ever, there's much more to this new Big Brother Bin Tax that meets the eye:
"When one looks across the whole range of government activity, a pattern is clearly emerging. Our privacy – and thus, inevitably, our freedom – is increasingly under attack."
Britain is the first country in the world to monitor and record the activity of every car in the country, using roadside cameras to follow the journeys of Britain's 35 million vehicles. Storing this information is said to help the fight against terrorism and other crime. But taken with the government's major home policy, the introduction of ID cards, plans for Biometric scanners in doctors surgeries, and, as revealed earlier this week, plans to extend the DNA database to the "UK Biobank Project", and Britain begins to look like one of the world's most closely-watched societies. How long, Pollard asks, before different departments demand access to supposedly separate parts of this databank, in the interests of "efficiency?"
And what happens then?
"Each time we allow the state to keep a further record of our movements, our habits, or our health, we get nearer to the day when, one day, we will wake up and realise that the state is no longer our servant. Instead, it will be our master. And, knowing everything there is to know about us, there will be no escape."
