By JULIA ANGWIN
LAST year, I spent more than $2,200 and countless hours trying to protect my privacy.
Some
of the items I bought — a $230 service that encrypted my data in the
Internet cloud; a $35 privacy filter to shield my laptop screen from
coffee-shop voyeurs; and a $420 subscription to a portable Internet
service to bypass untrusted connections — protect me from criminals and
hackers. Other products, like a $5-a-month service that provides me with
disposable email addresses and phone numbers, protect me against the
legal (but, to me, unfair) mining and sale of my personal data.
In
our data-saturated economy, privacy is becoming a luxury good. After
all, as the saying goes, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. And currently, we aren’t paying for very much of our technology.
Not
long ago, we would have bought services as important to us as mail and
news. Now, however, we get all those services for free — and we pay with
our personal data, which is spliced and diced and bought and sold.
Consider
Google, which scans what you write in Gmail to offer advertisers a
chance to promote their items based on your missives. Or a visit to an
online news site where your data is secretly auctioned and sold before
the page loads. Or Facebook, which allows marketers to turn your status
updates into ads for their products.
Those
who aren’t bothered by that exchange should keep in mind that our data
is used not just for advertisements. It has also been used to charge
people different prices based on their personal information. It has been
used to provide different search results to different people based on
their political interests. It has been used by the government to
identify possible criminal and terrorist suspects. Just last week, we
learned that the British government had intercepted and archived still
images from millions of Yahoo webcam chats around the world, whether or
not the participants were suspected of wrongdoing.
The more we learn about how our data is being harnessed — and how it may
be exploited in the future — the more likely we are to re-evaluate the
true cost of these supposedly free services. And some of us will start
trying to buy our way out of the trade-your-data-for-services economy.
But,
as I have learned, it isn’t cheap or convenient to start buying
privacy. I spend annoying amounts of time updating software or trying to
resolve technical difficulties when my different privacy-protecting
services conflict with one another.
It
all reminds me of the early days of the organic food movement, when
buying organic often meant trekking to inconveniently located,
odd-smelling stores and paying high rates for misshapen apples. Only the
devoted few were willing to suffer the hassles.
Over
time, however, the number of people worried about chemicals in their
food grew large enough to support a robust market. The stores eventually
became better looking, the apples were less misshapen, and organic food
entered the mainstream of American life.
A similar evolution in the personal-data-protection market is underway.
Traffic to the privacy-protecting search engine DuckDuckGo has more than
doubled since Edward J. Snowden revealed vast government surveillance
programs last June. The Blackphone, a $629 not-yet-released
Android-based smartphone that will have privacy-protecting software
installed to allow users to send encrypted texts and make encrypted
calls, is being pre-ordered by the thousands. And last year, a New York
entrepreneur, Adam Harvey, sold out of his first run of the OFF Pocket —
an $85 cellphone case that blocks signals to and from the phone. “My
vision is that privacy won’t be given to you as a law completely,” he
told me. “You have to commercialize it so people can speak with their
money.”
Standing
in the way of the widespread adoption of these tools, however, is the
problem of verification. I have Mr. Harvey’s OFF Pocket and it seems to
block the cell signals, but I don’t know for sure that it works as
promised. The same is true with the Blackphone, or DuckDuckGo’s privacy
policies. I hope their claims are true, but there are few trusted third
parties to verify them.
This
was brought home to me when I signed up for a service from TrustedID.
For $35, the company promised to opt me out of some of the biggest
American data brokers. A few months later, I contacted those brokers to
confirm that my information had been removed from their databases. It
turned out that TrustedID had failed to process more than half of the
opt-outs. The service has since been suspended.
As
more privacy-protecting services pop up, we need to consider two
important questions: Can we ensure that those who can afford to buy
privacy services are not being deceived? And even more important, do we
want privacy to be something that only those with disposable money and
time can afford?
The
food industry can offer some possible answers to those questions. Our
government enforces baseline standards for the safety of all food and
has strict production and labeling requirements for organic food. It may
be time to start doing the same for our data.
Julia Angwin is a senior reporter
at ProPublica and the author of “Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy,
Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance.”
