I was reminded of that grade-school experiment when, in recent weeks, I’ve read about China’s plans for a social-credit system, or S.C.S., that aims to compile a comprehensive national database out of citizens’ fiscal, government, and possibly personal information. First publicized, last year, in a planning document published by the State Council, S.C.S. was billed as “an important component part of the Socialist market-economy system,” underwriting a “harmonious Socialist society.” Its intended goals are “establishing the idea of a sincerity culture, and carrying forward sincerity and traditional virtues,” and its primary objectives are to raise “the honest mentality and credit levels of the entire society” as well as “the over-all competitiveness of the country,” and “stimulating the development of society and the progress of civilization.” Or, as it seemed to me, Stars of China, writ large.
.. The opacity of its infrastructure is disquieting. What safeguards will be put in place to prevent the database from being rigged? Will the very corruption that the social-credit system is meant to counter infect the system itself? Who will oversee the overseers of the operation? How will privacy, long under siege in contemporary China, be protected? And will punishment for political discontent be delivered through dismal credit scores? If S.C.S. becomes a mechanism of financial and social integration, it is hard to imagine how it could avoid becoming an instrument of mass surveillance.
Attempts to stay anonymous on the web will only put the NSA on your trail
A vivid description of this was provided recently by Janet Vertesi, a sociologist at Princeton University. She gave a talk at a conference describing her experience of trying to keep her pregnancy secret from marketers.
.. The really significant moment came when she came to buy a big-ticket item – an expensive stroller (aka pushchair) that was the urbanite’s equivalent of an SUV. Her husband tried to buy $500 of Amazon gift vouchers with cash, only to discover that this triggered a warning: retailers have to report people buying large numbers of gift vouchers with cash because, well, you know, they’re obviously money launderers.
The Internet With A Human Face
There’s another reason, besides fear, that’s driving us to save everything. That reason is hubris.
You’ve all seen those TV shows where the cops are viewing a scene from space, and someone keeps hitting “ENHANCE”, until pretty soon you can count the bacteria on the criminal’s license plate.
We all dream of building that ‘enhance’ button. In the past, we were going to build it with artificial intelligence. Now we believe in “Big Data”. Collect enough information, think of a clever enough algorithm, and you can find anything.
..It’s not just possible, but fairly common for someone to visit a Google website from a Google device, using Google DNS servers and a Google browser on the way.
.. The relationship between the intelligence agencies and Silicon Valley has historically been very cozy. The former head of Facebook security now works at NSA. Dropbox just added Condoleeza Rice, an architect of the Iraq war, to its board of directors. Obama has private fundraisers with the same people who are supposed to champion our privacy. There is not a lot of daylight between the American political Establishment and the Internet establishment. Whatever their politics, these people are on the same team.
.. A few weeks ago, the sociologist Janet Vertesi gave a talk about her efforts to keep Facebook from learning she was pregnant. Pregnant women have to buy all kinds of things for the baby, so they are ten times more valuable to Facebook’s advertisers.
At one point, Vertesi’s husband bought a number of Amazon gift cards with cash, and the large purchase triggered a police warning. This fits a pattern where privacy-seeking behavior has become grounds for suspicion. Try to avoid the corporate tracking system, and you catch the attention of the police instead.
.. Investor storytime is when someone pays you to tell them how rich they’ll get when you finally put ads on your site.
Pinterest is a site that runs on investor storytime. Most startups run on investor storytime.
.. But investor storytime is a cancer on our industry.
Because to make it work, to keep the edifice of promises from tumbling down, companies have to constantly find ways to make advertising more invasive and ubiquitous.
Government Backdoor – The Clipper Chip – flawed
The final nail in the coffin came after Matthew Blaze, then a 32-year-old computer scientist at AT&T Bell Laboratories, discovered a flaw in the Clipper system that would have allowed anyone with technical know-how to get access to the key to encrypted communications.
.. Leading technology companies, including Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter, have been moving to transient messaging plans that dispose of the encryption key to customers’ messages once their session ends.