I woke at 5.05 a.m. today. I had 6 hours and 37 minutes of sleep, slightly more than my weekly average of 6 hours and 21 minutes. I left home at 7:12 a.m. to catch the train, arriving at my building at RMIT University on Melbourneâs Swanston Street at 8:11 a.m. At 8:32 a.m. I walked with a colleague 450 metres to another RMIT University building on Russell Street for a short meeting. Once that was concluded, at 8:59 a.m. we both walked down Russell Street to an appointment with RMIT Onlineâs learning designers on Bourke Street, arriving by 9:07 a.m.
After spending 3 hours and 41 minutes at RMIT Online, I raced up Swanston Street for a 1 p.m. meeting with two other colleagues about a grant application we are preparing, a meeting which has been rescheduled more than a few times. At 1:40 p.m. I left for lunch, which cost $11.90 from Soul Origin Melbourne (so far this month Iâve spent $490.58 on âEntertainmentâ). I was back in the office by 1:56 p.m. Fifty-two minutes later I ordered a book on information and the state (US$17.29 from Abebooks.âcom) that might be useful when I write the relevant historical chapters, and created this new document.
My actual memory of this busy but not exciting sequence of events is vague. But I can write those two paragraphs in dull and accurate detail because I recorded it. Or, rather, it was recorded on my behalf. My Fitbit watch application tracks my sleep, breaking it down into REM, light and deep sleep. Google Mapâs timeline feature records my movements and locations in time and space with impressive accuracy. The slightly passive-aggressive notifications that appear on my phone from my bank track my spending. My calendar entries show who I had these meetings with.
I could go into much more tedious detail. My emails, my Evernote account (where I keep notes from meetings), my Dropbox account, my browser history (on my desktop at home, laptop at work, and mobile phone), my Goodreads and Kindle accounts, my social media accounts, my phone records, my text messages, my account with the task manager service Trello, invoicing software hosted in the cloud, Google Photos albums, as well as three separate Slack messaging accounts, record my thoughts and other information about my state of mind. The picture of my day could be rounded out by looking at the seven Safe City CCTV cameras that I would have passed as I walked between RMIT and Bourke Street, as well as dozens of privately owned CCTV networks.1 (There are 90 CCTV cameras in my building at RMIT alone.2)
We produce a torrent of data even as we do the most trivial activities. In his 1968 novel, Cancer Ward, the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described how each activity, each interaction, strung together created a vast web of information about each citizen and their relationships to each other:
Solzhenitsynâs threads are now digitized, documented, stored, and analysed. The digitization of everything has produced digital records of everything. All this information has enormous value. It has a great deal of value to me, from the trivial (it is interesting to browse the Google Timeline of trips overseas to recall the exact experiences, or to browse the register of books I have read but may have long forgotten) to the significant (this data helps me retrieve records of conversations and commitments, invoices of tax deductible goods I may have lost, and a complete digital trail if I ever need to prove previous activities). With access to just a fraction of those records I can reconstruct a detailed account of my daily life and interactions with others.As every man goes through life he fills in a number of forms for the record, each containing a number of questions. A manâs answer to one question on one form becomes a little thread, permanently connecting him to the local centre of personnel records administration. There are thus hundreds of little threads radiating from every man, millions of threads in all. If these threads were suddenly to become visible, the whole sky would look like a spiderâs web, and if they materialized as rubber bands, buses, trams and even people would all lose the ability to move, and the wind would be unable to carry torn-up newspapers or autumn leaves along the streets of the city. They are not visible, they are not material, but every man is constantly aware of their existence.3
But all this information has value to others as well. It has value to firms, which can use that information to build up detailed profiles of my preferences, my spending patterns, and my habits, which those firms can use to target products to me that have been tailored to my needs, identify gaps in the market, or plan for changes in consumer demand. This information has value to governments, which needs information to provide not only health, education, and welfare services, but would very much like to track my spending and activities to ensure Iâm paying all the tax I should be, and would also very much like to track my interactions as part of its security and law enforcement infrastructure. Finally, this information has value to people who might wish me harm. Perhaps thieves would like to know my pattern of travel to identify when I am at home and when I am not. Online scammers would like to know how I use the internet so they can trick me into handing over more valuable informationâbanking passwords, private cryptocurrency keys, and so forth. The list of potential âadversariesâ that we face is long: not just thieves and scammers, but foreign governments, emotionally or physically abusive partners, bullies in school and the workplace. Information has consequences. Medical concerns can be embarrassing, intimate, or could reveal deeply things about ourselves that might put at risk other aspects of our lives: work, families, friendships. Complaining about work can relieve stress but if revealed to employers those complaints might result in unemployment.
Humans have always sought to defend a zone of privacy around themselvesâto protect their personal information, their intimate actions and relationships, and their thoughts and ideas from the scrutiny of others. The ancient critics of democracyâIsocrates, Aristotle, and Platoâwere all frustrated that Athens protected the citizensâ private domain from moral education and virtuous state control.4 But the flood of data about our daily lives is new. Remarkably, consequentially new. Technology allows us to record, track, and scrutinize our lives in greater, more reliable detail than ever before. And it opens up vast new avenues for others to do the same: to track us and scrutinize us, to observe us and analyse us, often without our permission, often without our understanding or awareness. A generation ago, a walk around a city was unobservable to all but passers-by. Today, that walk is tracked by satellites, filmed by cameras, recorded by heart rate monitors and step counters, and the thoughts of the pedestrian discernable from email, social media, and web browser histories.
Not only is this information collected in vast quantities, it is often poorly secured. Barely a week goes by without a new story of a significant data breach. The leak of user data from the website Ashley Madison (a dating service that facilitates extramarital affairs) in 2015 was just one of the most dramatic breaches; in recent years we have seen large data breaches from the credit score company Equifax, Deloitte, Yahoo!, Appleâs iCloud service, Sony Pictures and Sonyâs PlayStation Network, and, of course, emails from the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 US Presidential Election. Less high profile but more pervasive are the episodes of unauthorized access to data that litter the legal systemâpublic servants accessing the tax records of celebrities and acquaintances, police officers trawling through crime databases looking for information on people they meet on dating services, or medical service numbers being sold on hidden parts of the internet.5
It doesnât take much data to infer sensitive information about a personâs life. Consider the travel data outlined above. Researchers have found that data about where someone has been is remarkably predictive of where that person will be in the future. In a paper published in Science in 2010, a group of computer scientists and complexity researchers found an average 93 per cent potential predictability of human mobility by ...