Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World by David Brin & Stephen W. Potts

Author:David Brin & Stephen W. Potts
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Another “classic”—this one an essay-rant from the beginning of the cyber age–

sheds light on how our concerns have evolved …

… yet stayed much the same.

PRIVATE LIFE IN CYBERSPACE*

JOHN PERRY BARLOW

I have lived most of my life in a small Wyoming town, where there is little of the privacy which both insulates and isolates suburbanites. Anyone in Pinedale who is interested in me or my doings can get most of the information he might seek in the Wrangler Café. Between them, any five customers could probably produce all that is known locally about me, including quite a number of items which are well known but not true.

For most people who have never lived in these conditions, the idea that one’s private life might be public knowledge … and, worse, that one’s neighbors might fabricate tales about him when the truth would do … is a terrifying thought. Whether they have anything to hide or not (and most everyone harbors something he’s not too proud of), they seem to assume that others would certainly employ their private peccadillos against them. But what makes the fishbowl of community tolerable is a general willingness of small towns to forgive in their own all that should be forgiven. One is protected from the malice of his fellows not by their lack of dangerous information about him but by their disinclination to use it.

I found myself thinking a lot about this during a recent San Francisco conference on Computers, Privacy, and Freedom. Like most of the attendees, I had arrived there bearing the assumption that there was some necessary connection between privacy and freedom and that among the challenges to which computers may present to our future liberties was their ability to store, transfer, and duplicate the skeletons from our closets.

With support from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Apple Computer, the WELL, and a number of other organizations, the conference was put on by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, a group which has done much to secure to Americans the ownership of their private lives. Their Man in Washington, Marc Rotenberg, hit the hot key which resulted in Lotus getting thirty thousand letters, phone calls, and e-mail messages protesting the release of Lotus Marketplace: Households.

In case you haven’t left your terminal in a while, this was a product whose CD-ROMs of addresses and demographic information would have ushered in the era of desktop junk mail. Suddenly anyone with six hundred bucks and a CD-ROM drive could have been stuffing your mailbox with their urgent appeals.

Marketplace withered under the heat, and I didn’t hear a soul mourn its passage. Most people seemed happy to leave the massive marketing databases in institutional hands, thinking perhaps that junk mail might be one province where democracy was better left unspread.

I wasn’t so sure. For example, it occurred to me that Lotus could make a strong legal, if not commercial, case that Marketplace was a publication protected by the First Amendment. It also seemed that a better approach to the scourge

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