Surveillance Vs. Privacy: A War People Aren't Fighting

Sep 4, 2007 4:34 PM

           

Largely unmonitored and apparently ineffective in solving any crimes, the video surveillance cameras in San Francisco housing projects have become symbols of futility and waste. The intrusive Big Brother implications of cameras peering into the daily lives of its citizens were ominous enough. But for many who responded to news of the cameras, the real crime is the money spent on something that simply doesn't work, reports The San Francisco Chronicle.

However it plays out, the controversy opens a window on a much larger truth: Americans are being closely and constantly watched, carefully scrutinized and meticulously monitored as never before. From government wiretapping, to Google cameras that offer up street-level views of private houses around the world, to mighty digital data banks that record and store everything from real estate loan applications to pizza purchases, the machinery of observation and analysis has become powerful and pervasive.

And how do members of the public react to all this unsought attention? In most cases, they either take it for granted or feel reassured. To a considerable extent, whether through willing acquiescence or willful innocence, people seem surprisingly ready to accept what would have been seen, not so long ago, as alarming invasions of privacy.

Indeed, in an age that empowers anyone with a cell phone camera and an Internet connection, we're all free to participate in this surge of information gathering and revelation. All of us can be spied on and engage in some high-visibility spying of our own, says the Chronicle.

"People have a desire to be protected," says Oscar Gandy, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. "We have this expectation that technology will solve the problem."

Jennifer King, a research specialist at the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley, told The San Francisco Chronicle that "surveillance feels comfortable to some people."

"There's a sense of guardianship, a feeling that someone is watching over me. It counteracts that aura of anonymity in the public space," she says.

Gary Marx was a 1960s UC Berkeley activist and civil libertarian who once took a "sky is falling" view that privacy was gravely endangered; he opposed virtually all intrusions. Today, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor emeritus has a more measured approach to the issue.

"Nobody used to check the backgrounds of adults who wanted to work with children," Marx says. "It's appropriate that we do that now. Children are safer because of it." Marx even argues that the problem of identity theft could be substantially controlled if people were willing to absorb the social and ethical costs of encoding more personal and biometric information, including facial topography and eye recognition data.

A number of privacy experts believe that the real concerns lie less in the public sphere than they do in the largely unregulated environs of commerce, reports The San Francisco Chronicle.

"It's a simple fact that private companies can collect information about people in ways the government can't," Robert O'Harrow Jr. wrote in his 2005 book "No Place to Hide." "At the same time, they can't be held accountable for their behavior or their mistakes the way government agencies can."

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