We now know that tracking and identifying people, both by determining
their positions through their cellphones and recognizing their faces, is not
only consistently possible but is almost as accurate as by getting their DNA. How can public policy and individual choices
combine to minimize the destructive privacy loss it is causing?
This is not an easy situation to negotiate. Some problems include the disadvantages of passing
laws which do not prevent force, fraud, or coercion, the right of people to opt
for what they want, and impeding generally beneficial law enforcement
information access. Yet we cannot do
nothing.
Accordingly, I recommend the
following.
First, as with the highly successful National Do Not Call
Registry, provide the right for people to opt out from having their phones
tracked and their faces compared with others.
The effort can be structured in much the same way as this facility,
which has cut back, maybe by a factor of ten, what would otherwise be daily
junk-phone-call bombardment, with easy online signup, long open opt-in times,
and enough of a grace period to allow organizations receiving facial and location
data to incorporate their own screening systems.
Second, extend the same restrictions to cellphone tower data
that we have on landline telephone wiretapping, for private as well as governmental
users.
Third, ban sharing of any location data collected by
smartphone apps. If they need it to
function themselves, such as for reporting the weather, they can use it without
passing it along.
Fourth, hold a national referendum on where the border should
be between data acceptable for collection by law enforcement agencies and that
which should be private, and implement laws and restrictions accordingly. The results of that countrywide, not
state-by-state, vote will direct us toward how we deal with facial recognition.
Fifth, publicize the need for people to make informed
choices about their cellphones, mobile applications, and opt-ins. Susceptibility to manipulation can be
controlled as much as the exploitation itself, and the power of tracking
technology is no excuse for Americans to act like sheep.
If these changes were implemented the marketplace would respond. With their income sources from sharing data
removed, apps might need to charge nominal amounts. Others could pay users for facial
identification, if that remained legal. A
sales point for telephone companies using improved technology could be to make
their devices personally unidentifiable.
None of these changes would be radical or would measurably
hurt our lives. They would merely end,
as put in the January 26th New York Times special-section-ending
editorial, “the incongruity between the robust legal regime around legacy
methods of privacy invasion and the paucity of regulation around more
comprehensive and intrusive modern technologies.”
The worst abuse possibilities of tracking information have
not yet materialized – but, as we have seen in this series, neither the laws
nor the technology’s current state can prevent them. That is why we need action as quickly as
possible. I hope that the facts about
surveillance are spread widely, and that our legislators start discussions soon. If not, we may end up all living thoroughly
public lives. That is not what we want.