The Erosion of Privacy in the Internet Era

Imagine if you waved to someone and, without your knowledge, a high-resolution camera took a photograph of your hand, capturing your fingerprints. You might be upset. Or—if you were visiting Disneyland, where they already make an image of your fingerprint to save you from waiting in a long line—you might find the novelty of the technology, and the immediate benefits…gratifying. The ambivalence we sometimes feel about new technologies that reveal identifiable personal information balances threats to privacy against incremental advantages. Indisputably, the trends toward miniaturization and mass-market deployment of cameras, recording devices, low-power sensors, and medical monitors of all kinds—when combined with the ability to digitally collect, store, retrieve, classify, and sort very large amounts of information—offer many benefits, but also threaten civil liberties and expectations of personal privacy. George Orwell’s vision in 1984 of a future in which the government has the power to record everything seems not so farfetched. “But even Orwell did not imagine that the sensors would be things that everybody would have,” says McKay professor of computer science Harry Lewis. “He foresaw the government putting the cameras on the lampposts—which we have. He didn’t foresee the 14-year-old girl snapping pictures on the T. Or the fact that flash drives that are given away as party favors could carry crucial data on everybody in the country.”