The right to privacy and data integrity

There is one critical aspect of life in the Information Age^[1] that merits Our particular care and attention.  This is the control of data and the protection of privacy. 

The right to privacy and data integrity in the Information Age is a presumption that, without your explicit consent, you should remain a mystery to faceless bureaucrats, marketeers, and other third parties who generally have no business enquiring into your personal affairs and collecting right or wrong data on you. 

As a moral citizen^[2] your right to privacy is a prohibition on others actively enquiring into your circumstances without your prior consent, or even incidentally collecting data on you that at some later time might be used to profile you. 

Developments in surveillance equipment, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and in data storage and retrieval, leave plenty of room for paranoia.  All kinds of rumours circulate among conspiracy theorists.  But we can discard most conspiracies not because there is not a very real tendency towards conspiracy - it is a fundamental human trait^[3].

We can laugh off conspiracy theories because it is unlikely that there are human beings anywhere on this planet, not even in the supposed leather armchairs of Zurich or Boston, who are able enough or composed enough^[4] to make any significant conspiracy last for any significant length of time in the face of the endless variables and temptations that life continually casts their way.  Conspirators, lacking both moderation and integrity, will invariably overreach or turn on each other. 

Nevertheless, the scope that Information Technology gives, and will increasingly give, for abuse is enormous; not just the sporadic and active abuse by individuals with access to personal data, or even the systematic abuse by the agents of any status quo^[5], but more especially the passive, indolent, incidental abuse by inert cyber-bureaucracies, whether in the public or private sector. 

Technology is on the horizon that will identify us by our smell.  Electronic sniffers could monitor how often an individual visits a store, identify known shoplifters as they enter and alert security staff.  Very accurate facial recognition technology is already with us that will identify you from even a part of your face.  Digital surveillance recording allows computers to sift through huge banks of video information.  It will be possible to pick individuals out of a crowd and track them as they move about and even hunt through old footage to see where they have been. 

AI has advanced at frightening and accelerating speed, without adequate checks and balances.  The recognition and extrapolation of your patterns of behaviour requires no human intervention.  The faceless and unaccountable profit or ideologically driven cyber master will predict what you and your loved ones are going to do next before it has occured to you.

The cashless society also presents its privacy and data abuse challenges.  The day is already with us when it is possible to track the movements of individuals by their transactions, with data detailing the times, locations, natures, and values of even their most inconsequential transactions.  Similarly your use of a mobile phone or your internet searches will leave an enduring and revealing trail.

With AI, increased networking of computers; and data sharing, matching, and selling among the data holders, the data power in the hands of faceless bureaucrats and business interests has increased, and is continually increasing not just nationally, but also internationally.  Certainly, it makes fraudsters and other criminals easier to catch, but it also represents a threat of unwarranted invasion of privacy, or worse, being unknowingly convicted without trial or redress^[6] and sentenced to having a permanent black mark by your name because of something's error or someone's malice.  The linking of diverse, seemingly innocuous databases, any one of which would not reveal a great deal about an individual, allows increasingly full profiles to be compiled of individuals, and also increases the likelihood of false or incorrect data contaminating other databases - databases of which you are not aware and that you are powerless to correct. 

The uncontrolled use of information technology by insensate bureaucracies or by unprincipled power seekers represents a significant threat to the quality of life, and the civil liberties of our generation and those of future generations.  Effective measures and continual vigilance by a committed global citizenry^[7] are required to limit the collection and availability of data on individuals and to ensure that what data is collected is true and fair and is readily amenable to challenge and correction by the individual.