mtbc | Predisposed toward anonymity

I like to choose what I share with others. My Usenet postings always use my real e-mail address and my journal postings here are public but this is content that I have chosen to share. I rarely avail myself of opportunity to restrict distribution by limiting visibility or by hiding my identity because I find life much simpler if I am not routinely juggling secrets. The kind of secret to which one should default to never telling anybody is easily managed but it is hard work to remember who is supposed to know what and it is a fool who behaves as if information will remain contained once shared with a few others.

I do however instinctively value my ability to act privately: my attitude is much that if I am not affecting or bothering you then my actions should be largely off your radar. A reason I enjoyed rural Ohio is that I could play music or tinker with my car in the driveway or have my then-little children fire off their toy rockets or whatever without a thought for others. I also prefer to avoid store loyalty cards, or at least to exchange them with others, because I do not want stores characterizing my buying patterns.

From a computer security point of view, I expect even a government-held database that contains much significant information, vehicle movements or whatever, is likely to be cheaply queryable by anybody who pays, and will plausibly wholly leak someday. Practically one cannot well secure anything that many people must have some access to, that is nearly as doomed as trying to deliver uncopyable streaming media, and information technology has its fair share of idiot professionals who look good on paper.

The targeted advertising folks have been making great strides in privacy-breaking technology. People who think that incognito browser windows stop Google knowing what pornography they like are deluding themselves. The ultrasonic signals embedded in commercial advertising were a surprise even to me.

I have a good knowledge of how computers work and I routinely encrypt my backups using a passphrase stored only in my head, I use the Tox protocol to chat even with my own mother, I do not let random consumer devices on our home network communicate externally beyond our firewall, etc. but it would take rather more money and effort for me to make arrangements that gave me any serious confidence in my own data privacy and even then I would be relying on assumptions about lack of cooperation among different law enforcement jurisdictions and a bit of luck about who, for example, had not hacked whose managed networking hardware.

Further, if I want to act in the real world then what I do leaves so many small traces: financial, shipping and logistics, etc. Even without the subsequent work from the well-funded targeted advertising community, I know from my own previous work in the defense industry that bulk assembly of those disparate observations into coherent narrative is plausible, at least enough that its value would outweigh its fallibility.

It is not that I have anything to hide so much as I do not want the cognitive load of considering how the leakage and persistence of my personal information could affect me in unforeseen ways. I like to find out about all kinds of things and interact with all manner of people to whose ideology I do not subscribe: one has to leave one's own bubble in order to discover one's own mistakes and to help others notice theirs. I am well aware that carefully marshaled evidence can paint a very misleading picture. The death threats being addressed to staff at Great Ormond Street Hospital show how easily good people can unwittingly find themselves being the target of an irrational mob and that is even without any bad faith existing on the part of law enforcement.

With the combined forces of private profit in characterizing consumers and the public political need to be seen to be countering terrorism, I do not hold out much hope for civil liberties campaigners persuasively making privacy a big issue. While I greatly value being able to, for example, buy something using cash and without being asked why I want it or where I live, I wonder if it may not be long before contactless payment becomes as hard to avoid as the face recognition in the CCTV as I enter the store.

We have motive on multiple fronts to penetrate individual privacy, ongoing progress in technological means of doing so, increasing acceptance of sharing one's data, and a social and intellectual climate that got Donald Trump elected President against even my pessimistic expectations. What could possibly go wrong?

I do not need to act covertly but I always drew comfort from knowing that I probably could if necessary and that my business was mostly nobody else's. Further, I do not want to enable what I see as organizations' immoral beliefs about my own privacy. Now I wonder if I will find myself wistfully looking back to a time when I did not have to carefully consider the possible optics of my every move.