The Privacy Invasion

In Rockwell's hit Somebody's Watching Me, one of his lines is "I always feel like somebody's watching me and I have no privacy." In this day and age these lyrics couldn't be truer. David Brin writes about the possibility of two different types of cities. One city is a myriad of cameras that "report their urban scenes straight to Police Central where security officers use sophisticated image processors to scan for infractions against an established way of thought." At first glance, this doesn't sound so bad. In fact, it sounds nice to know that the police will be able to do their job extremely well and crime rates could drop significantly. But then it sets in. How long till they start to misuse the information they have? One day they'll be using the cameras to help fight crime and the next day they're using it to spy on friends or enemies of theirs and getting a hold of personal information. Garfinkel mentions that our personal information is already being given out to third parties and that credit cards with private information can be viewed by officials to track where they've been and what they've been doing, which can be useful when solving a crime, but there is a very fine line between using that information for good and having it at your own disposal.

Jeffrey Rosen - Is Privacy Dead?

In this video, Jeffrey Rosen is talking about how privacy, to an extent is dying; how it no longer exists. All personal bubbles are being broken into and invaded. He mentions how things have changed severely since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Phone calls and emails could be hacked into in order to find out if there was any relation to the attacks. Security has become a lot stricter wherever we go, airports being a prime example. It used to be a simple luggage scan to make sure there were no weapons and a metal detector to make sure nothing out of the ordinary was on you. But after 9/11 that all changed. There really is no sense of privacy in the airport now, Bags can be personally checked to make sure of nothing illegal, and rather than a simple metal detector, Rosen reveals how airports now have x-ray technology that can get a view of the person's actual naked body through clothing. This is repulsive in general and especially in the cases of underage children and disrespect to the elders. Also, many people have morals. The last thing they want strangers having is naked pictures of them. Privacy has no existence anymore in an airport. Again, they claim it is for our own good and safety, but when ordinary people have easy access to things like that, it no longer serves the purpose it was intended for.

Brin recognizes this problem and opens up to the idea of the second city. The second city is similar in the aspect that there are still cameras perched on every vantage point. However, "These devices do not report to the secret police. Rather, each and every citizen of this metropolis can use his or her own wristwatch television to call up images from any camera in town." Again, this sounds like a great concept. A person walking at night can check to make sure no one is lurking around the corner. Likewise a parent can check to see where there child may have run off to if they were missing. Even better, a shoplifter at a mall can be spotted and taken into custody in no time. And if that's not enough, as far as police headquarters goes, "any citizen may tune in on bookings...especially the camera control room itself, making sure that the agents on duty look out for violent crime, and only crime." This sounds great! We can even make sure the police don't abuse this power, but of course at some point the citizens will use it for their own personal desires such as to stalk someone they know, or to spy right in someone's backyard and just as easily upgrade to drones that they could steer right into the "privacy" of someone's home and record all of their passwords and other personal information. No matter which approach is taken, privacy is invaded. The invasion may claim to be for the good of the people, but in reality it may really be used for one's own shameful use. As this technology evolves even more and the idea of all citizens or anyone at all having access to seeing your every move and all your personal information, Rockwell's song about being paranoid that someone is always watching may not be a huge stretch from the truth.