Pay Close Attention to What’s Happening on the Path Back To “Normal”
We are all carefully watching our government leaders decide when to re-open non-essential businesses and build a path back to some sense of “normal life.” But some of the transition solutions being tossed around should be sounding your privacy alarm. I am, in all transparency, a privacy nut, particularly in the digital transformation era.
I care about privacy and have since the early days of social media and smart phones when I realized what was happening. I believe in the importance of privacy and have been concerned in the past to see how much data big technology companies are gathering and how much of it is used by third parties to develop profiles of us that can be sold without our consent or knowledge. Before this pandemic, I was uneasy about how much information so many would give away for the sake of convenience. I was disheartened at how employees at Amazon confessed to the surveillance capabilities of Ring and Alexa.
I’ve been alarmed at how much very personal information some will give away in social media in order to curate their lifestyle or share their opinions. In modern society, most of us will allow geolocation tracking on our phone to have food ready when we pull up, have an Uber or Lyft when you need it or get your boarding pass to an airplane on your phone.
All of this concerned me before. Now, we have a pandemic. We all quickly gave up most of our daily freedoms of movement and travel in a matter of about two weeks for the sake of the greater good. We feel good about doing that to help others and protect ourselves and our families. But now, our leaders are talking about how to slowly get us going and many of the solutions further erode our privacy.
Airline Travel. After September 11, 2001, we all readily accepted that in order to travel by airplane safely, we must accept taking off our shoes, belt, or other clothing. We must remove our laptops and subject ourselves to a public groping if a necklace or button set off the screening machines. We accepted that invasion of our privacy to keep us safe. Since then, some of those restrictions are relaxed if we are willing to give up all privacy and submit to a government background check for TSA pre-check and Global Entry, which could track all of our movements through air travel. I, like many, willingly gave up that privacy for convenience, because it made regular airline travel so much more bearable and I didn’t feel like I was giving up that much in exchange for a better experience.
Watch for that happening now. Right now, plans are being developed in the name of safety that will take away more of our rights of privacy. It’s not hard to imagine in the near future, we will be subject to health screenings right after or before physical security screenings at airports. We may be subject to having our temperature taken or other screenings by a government worker at checkpoints before we can proceed. Our bodies may be touched in ways we do not find acceptable by anyone but our trusted physician. We could be subject to it again before we board the airplane or at any number of times. Don’t be surprised if in the future, submitting a regular full physical and medical exam complete with our vaccinations will be the fast lane to air travel, which means more government agencies and companies obtaining a complete profile of us. Also, expect that when vaccines are available, airline travel may be denied to those who decline to get the vaccine or are unable to get the vaccine. The same could be true at amusement parks or even hotels.
I am not sure what that will do to the anti-vaccination community or if such restrictions will apply to mostly eradicated diseases like polio, measles, and mumps. Remember those groups and how they said it was a violation of their rights to force them to get vaccinated?
Surveillance & Tagging. Many leaders are already talking about surveillance and tracking of individuals with apps on phones. If a grocery store could track who comes in and out and then learn someone has sneezed and contracts this or any other virus, could local officials then contact you and put you on quarantine because you were in the store at the same time? Will drone based cameras track where you are and if you were closer than 6 feet to another human you could receive a fine, like a speeding ticket? The technology already exists to do all of this. And this is just the beginning. Imagine a local police official coming to your door and tagging you that you have been exposed to a virus even if you never carry the disease. Imagine the disruption to your life, to your family, to your ability to earn a living. Imagine if they tagged you with a bracelet, like house arrest, to know if you violated the quarantine when you did nothing more than pick the wrong time to do your grocery shopping. This is the new reality knocking on our door.
Government and Big Data. On March 27, Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google wrote an essay in the Wall Street Journal touting the need for government to get with big tech on using data and algorithms to track and predict the spread of disease. I find that alarming since Google employees forced the company to cease a project with the US government to more effectively use drones to avoid killing innocent people, but had no problem helping the Chinese government build a surveillance based artificial intelligence tool. If big tech companies, which already possess unfathomable amounts of data on all of us, partner up with the government to further surveil us, then we have truly entered an Orwellian state, if we have not already.
Remote Work & Zoom. As most have flocked to remote work environments, Zoom, the popular free video conference platform, faced hacking in a prankster style. Their CEO apologized, promising they would fix the faulty code that allowed it. The reality is that almost any platform has vulnerabilities and with a large percentage of the population now working remotely via computers and devices, the opportunities for bad actors to hack in either for a prank or for real harm will become greater. So many people quickly download these apps to their phones without checking the settings. Make sure that when you download anything with a camera that you turn the camera and speakers off when you are not using it. Otherwise, you are leaving on a window into your very personal home life. Just like Alexa devices were found to be listening in to personal, private conversations to improve their AI and voice capability and a Ring camera was hacked by a prankster who terrified a young girl, every one of these seemingly innocent platforms is a window in your life if you don’t shut it off when you aren’t using it. And, whose to say that Zoom, like Facebook, is not working with third parties that could capture data about your usage without your knowledge or consent? You may think it is harmless, until it is used against you in an unimaginable way. Also, remember nothing is free. Companies that give things away for free are tracking data about you to sell to third parties – that’s how they make their money.
I’ve worked in technology and intellectual property for the last twenty years. As the two disciplines intersected to create digital transformation and privacy exposure, I’ve evolved into working with directors to help them manage the governance and oversight needed from the boardroom. I’ve been following the privacy issues accelerating since social media started and have always sounded the alarm to not just clients, but my friends too. I’m sounding it again now.
We all want to do our part to help bring this pandemic to an end quickly and with the minimum amount of lives lost and suffering. But as more is asked of us as individuals and more is asked of your company, think carefully about the slippery slope of giving up too much privacy too quickly. We will not get our privacy back, and it will just keep eroding for our children, grand-children and future generations. If you are fortunate enough to have a seat at a boardroom table and lead your company through this time, think carefully about
what you give up personally. Think about what you demand of your employees who may have few options or ability to assert their own rights of privacy in order to keep their job. Think about what it means for the future, not just a quick solution to get back up and running today.
The privacy alarm is ringing, and I fear not enough people will listen because it’s easier and more convenient to just give in to it to get back to “normal”. If we do, there will never be a “normal” again.
I hope you are staying healthy and well through this unprecedented time. If you have comments or want to
discuss these issues, don’t hesitate to reach out to me at jwolfe@consultwolfe.com.
Read more about the issues raised in this post (these are just a few - there are so many more):