 My name is Kevin Mahaffey and I'm going to be speaking today about the changing notions of privacy in American culture And I would like to start with a quote from Scott McMillie who is the CEO of Sun Microsystems in 1999 And he said you already have zero privacy get over it Sorry When most people talk about privacy issues in America they focus on the government interaction with the individual and abuses within that context and it's very representative of the disciplinary notion of technology which is used to enforce laws and punish individuals based on infractions of those laws and the disciplinary notion of surveillance carries no individual benefit which is made it widely unpopular for the individual and It's only perceived as a threat to individual living and freedom and this is mainly created a culture of mistrust reinforced by everyday examples of Disciplinary surveillance and I first talked about the dystopian literature of 1984 by George Rolo and with Big Brother and the telescreens all the technology is used for is to reduce liberty and enforce the laws of the current regime and The culture of mistrust is also reinforced by real totalitarianism Such as the Nazi Germany and Polster to Russia which serve as concrete examples of faults of disciplinary surveillance However parallel to the growth of government surveillance Commercial surveillance has really taken root in society and this began in the 19th century to combat the danger of anonymous individuals and business There are two brothers called the Tappins who started the whole trend by interviewing and keeping records of all the merchants they dealt with and This really became a huge trend in the business industry where these two brothers ended up opening the first credit agency Where they had over 10,000 agents including a young Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln at one point and like a self-issued SSL certificate the problem with this was that it was wasn't authoritative and you only could tell the profile and link that with the person by the name and That was a huge problem, especially in the mid 20th century when the growth of financial services Prompted huge amounts of fraud current everywhere and the authoritative link originally came from the government And it started with a ways about social security policy, which created a unique idea for any individuals And this was a huge price issue in the time, but there's about Pitched it to the people by saying that the social security number would only be used to dull out benefits and it would be basically an aid service and it carried no problem for the individual and This was not to be shared with law enforcement of any kind, which as you know is definitely changed recently and In the mid 20th century as considering alliance and the financial services grew so did fraud and the social security member was definitely used as a link between an individual and multiple databases and the public essentially had no choice in the acceptance of social security members because the benefits provided by the Financial institutions greatly outweigh the seemingly small loss of privacy. For example, you can't cash a paycheck without your social security member Can't get credit. There's no insurance available and now this small step for the social security member made it possible for all private databases to be cross queried and this made the personal definitive profile Possible essentially and now in which today where commercial surveillance is greatly greater than Greater more prevalent than government surveillance and it's interestingly not seen as a threat because there's no law enforcement attached to it It's in the background. It's non-invasive and it's only used for benefits such as loans and check cashing and One congressman has commented on this saying that big brother is simply subcontract subcontracted out to corporate America and the big idea behind this commercial surveillance is to put people in demographic categories and Now we reach a time where that media is so interactive that you need such precise demographic categories that passive monitoring Is not enough and it's the reality and daily life of the individual that really matters And this is only accomplished by comprehensive surveillance Whereas people have into interaction with monitor monitoring tools, which is a type of surveillance normally associated with governments But now they've been accepted as a positive good because Companies are offering the rewards for people to submit themselves to the surveillance Which brings me to the main topic of what I want to speak about today And that's how the public is embracing surveillance is normal and commercial They become a nonchalant in a reaction to these increasingly invasive mechanisms And that's mostly because companies are giving incentives for the person to give them their information There's a pizza parlor up in Berkeley by UC Berkeley that if you gave all the information required to set up for a credit card Number they would give you a free 12-inch pizza and they have lines out the door for people giving out this information that could be used for identity theft or anything right job for a five five dollar pizza and This is also been reinforced by the cultural phenomena of the webcam and blogging movements and the reality to you Surveillance is entertainment. It's no longer big brother trying to get you It's it's a way to make your life more complete and be a trendsetter and all that And a lot of incestuous circles in this privacy market of reality TV What big brother for example all these housemates for a chance that fate and celebrity status sell their privacy to the producers and Consumers for for a promise of inner interactivity and free entertainment. Good. The shows website They fill out surveys for their own demographic information and the producers can get a minus to reinvent the shows presentation and in turn Give exact People exactly what they want and finish increasingly advanced data mining software comes consumer ranking and categorization Where content delivery becomes more or active you have more detailed data mining required and Google is the prime example This incredibly detailed data mining to present interactive content in their absence the track your links or your previous click habits your website history and your geographic location to display targeted ads and the new new Gmail system does all the above plus it It reads all of your personal correspondence to put you in a very precise demographic category when people are Getting crazy of these Gmail accounts. I mean it's a Gmail account is like gold right now So it shows that the loss of privacy is really not an issue for most Americans or most users of Gmail And the reason is it's because with corporate surveillance is that consumers only receive benefits This is not to say that advertisements are benefits But targeted as advertisements are better than untargeted ads when scholar presents the example of modern newspaper Which is basically marketers nightmare. It's a hundred pages men are passing up women's clothing ads children are passing up shampoo coupons and This and it's completely waste of time and energy and they argue that but with demographic data You can present the content and the ads that you are interested in your I see the new time and energy and they presented as a positive good and All this data is very useful, but how is it being gathered? First of all, they're in doing a dot-com there There's a company called free PC dot-com which offered a free computer in exchange for complete monitoring and display Advertisement on the screen at all times and despite this blatant breach of privacy via almighty power free prevailed And they receive 300,000 applicants the very first day And one of the problems with consumer categorization is that it's often overworked by privacy-minded individuals when presented by all these benefits such as free computers and Celebrity status by these companies and we're possibly entering a new age of automated discrimination by databases For example in some food company call series people are tagged as they call to the operator with a red yellow or green Green customers are the profitable customers and the operators are instructed to bend over backwards give them anything they want Yellow yellow customers are marginally profitable They're dealt with but no Concessions have been made to them and for the red customers, you know the operators are told to be assholes try to get rid of them if at all possible and How do you how do you fix your rating if you're red green or yellow and you can't really need this system? All you can do is generate more data which creates a vicious cycle of surveillance and The TVO is a really good example of this where everything you watch on the TVO system is sent to the main headquarters and They classify you as a certain type of demographic category and There's one guy in Los Angeles who somehow classified as gay under the TVO system and He didn't like that because he thought he was straight So he decided to watch a whole bunch of war movies and guy stuff and So the data money looked at all this data and saw this fixation fixation of violence It started recording documentaries of Joseph Goebbels thinking he's a neo-nazism sort But um This this pop culture fascination will eventually disappear and we'll be left with all the surveillance infrastructure everywhere UK for example, there's a CCTV system almost on every business step on every apartment building And that's not going to take them down and you wouldn't be left with the infrastructure in habituated public We're going to be used to surveillance so they're going to see now we need to get rid of it So you can't I mean it's really impossible to rid of infrastructure once it's creative We need some kind of human accountability Right now we only have a trust accountability which works at something like this where you can refuse the company's services for example Let's do a super market discount cards You maybe don't want to take that 10 cent discount on potatoes if you don't have to because of all your purchasing habits are being tracked But right now there's nothing that's happening with those purchasing habits. You're not being discriminated against So there's no reason for people not to use these priestly eliminating tools however Once gathered the data is mostly harmless in all mighty ways of done settings in commercial hands and Basically no repercussions for generating data right now But what if the government buys or seizes these commercial databases in the 1980s? a whole bunch of kids gave their addresses in birthdays to an ice cream parlor for exchange for a free Sunday on their birthday and The government actually bought this database and used all the names and birthdays to send draft cards in the kids 18th birthday and And surveillance is such that these incentives to surrender the privacy are worth far less than the data And the ice cream probably cost 10 cents and the government I'm sure paid much more than that to bring the data off of the Company and people especially with when things are given away for free They don't don't think about how much their personal data is worth because they succumb to the almighty power of free and It's really not prudent for anyone to have surveillance powers over population because the data Mostly homeless in their hands of advertisers is dangerous in government If an Adolf Hitler or even worse Jerry Falwell would become president the day TV guy wouldn't last 30 minutes into patent before he'd be sent to a Glog, I mean It's worse of all this data is gleaned. It's it's anybody's business, and it's not just the company you gave it to and I'd like to open up for questions if you have any comments or Yes, okay. Well, thank you very much