Days of their lives
On April 26, 1949, a psychologist named Roger Barker embarked on an extraordinary experiment in the wonderfully named little town of Oskaloosa in Kansas, USA. It was an extraordinary experiment documenting very ordinary things. Barker went to Oskaloosa, a town of just 725 people, and asked parents if he and his fellow psychologists could be allowed to follow their child for one day. One proud set of parents said yes, and the results were summed up two years later in a book called One Boy's Day.
On that faithful April morning, eight clipboarded men working in shifts followed the boy around to jot down his every action, to the most minute details. The book, again, is extraordinary exactly because of its ordinariness. It tries to be nothing but what it is, and offers no interpretation or judgement on the boy's actions. All it is is a transcription of the events of the day. Thus the book starts:
7:00. Mrs. Birch said with pleasant casualness, "Raymond wake up." With a little more urgency in her voice she spoke again: "Son, are you going to school today?"
7:01. Raymond picked up a sock and began tugging and pulling it on his left foot. As his mother watched him she said kiddingly, "Can't you get your peepers open?"… He said plaintively, "Mommie," and continued mumbling in an unintelligible way something about his undershirt.
And so on, and so forth. You can easily see the value of such a document for historians. A common problem of writing history is that only the history that is deemed eventful and momentous is written down, so we often know disappointingly little of the habits of everyday life in past ages. Of course, the question immediately arises: is the behavior of a boy not changed by the sudden appearance of a clipboarded man? Probably, yes. But as our fantastical canon of children's books can attest to, the younger we are, the more adaptable to unlikely changes. Within a short time, the boy does not seem to notice the clipboard man at all anymore.
Barker and his colleagues went on to repeat the experiment with other kids in Oskaloosa, and the psychologists became a part of life there, blending in the background as it were, like the dark raincoated men in espionage movies. I could not help but think of the movie Synecdoche, New York, where when the protagonist, a theater director, is writing himself in his own play, a man comes up at casting who has shadowed him all his life:
I've been following you for twenty years. So I knew about this audition because I follow you. And I've learned everything about you by following you. So hire me. And you'll see who you truly are. Peek-a-boo.
Days of our lives
One Boy's Day was an experiment. Synecdoche, New York is fiction. No one follows us around. People who claim that they are being followed are called paranoid, and paranoia is a disorder. And yet, with the NSA scandal on our hands, and everything we know now about the privacy policies of the large Silicon Valley corporations, the crazy people might slowly turn out to be correct. Of course, we are not followed by shady men, but by digital networks abstractly compiling the streams of information we willingly send out every day. As British band Hard-Fi sang back in 2005: We're the stars of CCTV, making movies out on the street / We're the stars of CCTV, can't you see the camera loves me?
Willingly? Well, sort of. We agreed, after all. As the documentary Terms and Conditions May Apply points out, these long texts of semi-legal wish-wash that we all skip over when we sign up for something, allow these companies to spy on us without having to call it spying. They simply 'collect data' and all they want is for you to agree to them being able to freely use this data.
As it turns out, just this day I had a university class concerning the form of content, on how we recognize a letter even if all the actual content in it is crossed out. In the spacing, the address at top, and signature at bottom, we recognize the letter. A Terms and Conditions text can also be recognized by form. It generally uses a small type, hardly any spacing, and is quite often written entirely in capitals. Ask any typographer what text is hardest to read and his answer probably amounts to just about the same specifics. This is not accidental. They don't want you to read it. Content-wise, too, it is difficultly formulated and unnecessarily long. Even if you do take the effort to read it, you might still not have a clue what you are agreeing to. Most likely, you will give up and agree anyway.
And so the data accumulates and accumulates and accumulates. If you've been on the web for a while, you might have noticed the slow disappearance of open input fields from social networks. A website like Myspace allowed for a lot of free customization, and people would often write a short bio and a list of their favorite movies and music and books. Importantly, this was a list in text format, without markup. It was hard (though not impossible) to aggregate and sell this data. This is why now on Facebook there is a page or at least an 'object' of some sort for everything, so that all the likes can be easily packaged and sold together to whomever it may concern. There is no risk anymore of valuable data being missed thanks to spelling errors. You know, humane errors. Phew.
Who we truly are
How much data are we talking about, then? When Max Schrems, a student from Austria who was concerned about his digital footprint, requested his file from Facebook (a request which, by law, they have to comply to), he got a whooping 1200 pages in the mail. The files, among many other things, "kept records of every person who had ever poked him, all the IP addresses of machines he had used to access the site (as well as which other Facebook users had logged in on that machine), a full history of messages and chats and even his 'last location', which appeared to use a combination of check-ins, data gathered from apps, IP addresses and geo-tagged uploads to work out where he was." Most alarmingly perhaps, was that deleted data turned out not to be deleted data at all. All that happens when you delete something on Facebook is the addition of a 'delete' flag that hides it from you. It is still there for Facebook to look into. This has large implications. If you are like me, and started worrying about Facebook only later when reports on privacy became more frequent, you might have had a lot of information on your profile at first, and then removed it later. According to Schrems, all that information is actually still there.
In the september issue of Harper's Magazine, writer William T. Vollmann unfolds a similar, though far more disturbing, story. In this article, titled Life as a Terrorist, he too requested his file - at the FBI - and got 294 pages back (though 785 pages were still 'in review' and there might actually be more that they are holding back. Reading through his own files, he suddenly found out that he had been repeatedly suspected as a terrorist, primarily in the nineties threat of the Unabomber. Even after the real Unabomber had been apprehended, Vollmann still experienced long waits, holdups and hostile behavior when he tried to re-enter the USA (his home country) after a trip abroad. He surmises, painfully, that…
I learned that to be suspect, it is enough to have been formerly wrongly suspected.
People will keep on telling you that privacy is unnecessary if you have nothing to hide. Or, as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt once said: "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place." If this is the prevailing thought nowadays, we've come a long way from the famous words of Justice Louis Brandeis in 1890:
Privacy is the right to be let alone.
Instead of changing privacy policies, we are attuning our ideas about what privacy entails. If we keep going along this path, we will end up like those kids in Oskaloosa. We will stop noticing the clipboarded men.
