Richard BF

Privacy is dead, so get over it.

I came to this point in January 2005, and had written a scripted fictional video to drive the point home, but I never got around to producing it. No matter, its now October 2005, so I figured I better get the idea out there.

The way technology is heading, we will soon all be carrying around multipurpose handheld devices for phone, organising and audio/visual playback and recording. These devices will all be directly IP addressable on the Internet, meaning we will soon have the ability to broadcast 24 hour a day footage of our or other peoples’ lives. I could connect to your camera in real time, record, remix and make it available to someone else in real time.

With the digital age, electronic recording of personal details, and the countless surveillance cameras that film us every day of our lives, many of which are also now available on the Internet, governments started to put privacy legislation in place several years ago.

However the interesting thing is that governments realise that prevention isn’t the answer. These laws don’t hide and protect our personal information, they mostly only allow us to find out what people have already recorded about us.

Like was the case with DRM, the flexibility of the technology will eventually outweigh the right to privacy. Like region coding on DVDs, manufacturers will open up their device capability, because we want them to. There’s a market for small unrestricted cameras and audio recorders, and the market will certainly supply them.

So let us assume that privacy will inevitably be massively breached, and that we have no control over it. What happens next?

Well, because so much footage will be available on the Internet, people will begin to get used to it, and eventually not actually care that their lives are being recorded and made available to the public. With billions upon billions of personal videos available online, who will really care any more? And if that’s the case, then privacy is effectively dead.

The only reason we are precious about our privacy, is because we’ve always had it that way, and we’ve been brought up to think that way.

When I raised this at the Melbourne videoblogger meetup earlier this year, the response was that the public would eventually self regulate and stop privacy breaches. But as a pretty moral person myself, I have no qualms including other people in my videos without their permission, and I’m sure most videobloggers are the same. What happens when the immoral people start videoing? As video recorders become ubiquitous, the self regulating moral few will have no effect at all.

While current opinion is that a person’s privacy needs to be respected and protected, in the long run it won’t be, and we’ll just get over the preciousness of privacy. In the circles I’m in, I constantly meet people who no longer care about privacy and being filmed. When will you?

Privacy is dead. So get over it.