The End of Privacy: Or Why Your Home is Not Your Castle And Your Data is not Your Own

Once upon a time, your home was considered your castle, a sphere of absolute privacy, where you could reliably escape prying eyes. No one, except perhaps the constable, dared even enter one’s home without permission. And with the eventual rise, at least in the more democratic corners of the globe, of legal privacy rights, even the constable was required to be solicitous of the sanctity of the home as a zone of privacy.

Of course, people have always invited others into their homes. But even an invited and welcome guest is still expected to respect one’s privacy. Though the temptation to do so may sometimes be great, sneaking around, stealing furtive looks into our cupboards, cabinets, or closets is not behavior we would happily tolerate from invited guests. Unfortunately, with the emergence of the so-called smart home, stocked with internet-enabled gadgets galore, gadgets that we have eagerly invited into the home, this sort surreptitious snooping behavior is becoming more and more common.

According toThe New York Times, Amazon, makers of the smart speaker Alexa, has applied for a patent fora “voice sniffer algorithm”这将使大量智能家居设备能够在你日常生活的背景下记录和分析大量音频数据，而不引人注目。在精确分析了你何时会使用“爱”、“买”或“不喜欢”等词的基础上，该算法将计算出，当你舒服地躺在沙发上、看电视、玩电子游戏、给朋友发短信或漫无目的地上网时，该向你展示哪些完美定制的广告。

Nor is it only in the home that data collection and analysis algorithms will do their work. As we made clear on our recent episode onThe Internet of Things, soon the entire built environment—including your school, your workplace, your car, the places where you shop, eat, and play—will amount to a series of platforms for collecting and analyzing reams and reams of data about us. In effect, we will be reduced to little more than collections of data points. And collections of data points—even living, breathing ones—are not the sorts of things that have reasonable expectations of privacy.

对隐私的侵犯已经持续了很长时间，而且有许多不同的来源。毫无疑问，它得到了政府和企业的帮助。在我们生活的许多方面都日益受到过度监控的影响，每一个都在其中扮演了决定性的角色。各国政府走上这条道路，或许是出于对安全的一种可以理解但仍然过度的担忧。企业这样做是出于对自身底线的执着。也许更难让我们承认的是，我们自己在隐私逐渐被侵蚀中所扮演的角色。我认为，隐私与其说是被剥夺了，不如说是被我们放弃了，这比我们愿意承认的更真实。我们献出了它，却得到了看似微不足道的回报。我们毫不犹豫地将数据提供给Facebook和谷歌之类的网站，并自欺欺人地认为，为了与朋友聊天、玩无聊的游戏、观看源源不断的猫、婴儿和旅游视频，我们付出的数据是合理的。

我们没有意识到的是我们与各种网络平台达成的交易的真正本质。Facebook就是一个很好的例子。虽然人们倾向于认为自己是Facebook的“用户”，但严格来说我们并不是他们的用户。我们是商品，是他们出售的商品，不仅卖给商业广告商，也卖给政治竞选、心理和医学研究人员，以及一大堆在探究、分析和操纵我们的行为方面有既得利益的人，无论我们的行为是好是坏，线上线下都有。这些组织、企业和活动才是Facebook真正的客户。

现在，我们未能充分认识到我们所达成的协议的本质的一个原因是，在这个领域的广告几乎没有无真相。将Facebook称为“社交媒体平台”，无异于将牛肉企业称为“牛兄弟平台”。一个更诚实的标签应该是“数据收集平台”。我们邀请到家里的许多所谓的智能设备也是如此。将“个人数据助理”带入你所谓的城堡是一回事。而将一个秘密的数据挖掘设备带入其中则完全是另一回事。前者可能会让人感到赋权，而后者可能会损害一个人的隐私。同样地，如果Facebook用“欢迎来到我们的数据收集平台”之类的话来欢迎你，那听起来就没那么好了。的确，这听起来有点不祥。但它确实有更诚实的好处。

Psychologists, philosophers, marketers, and others know that labels matter a great deal. They help us frame issues and phenomena. And there is overwhelming empirical evidence that the human mind is highly sensitive to framing effects. Frame a scenario as one involving potential gains and we humans reason about it in one way. Frame the very same scenario as one that involves potential loses and we reason about it in an entirely different way. Framing Facebook, and other such platforms, as social media platform invites us to notice all the cool and fun things that we can do on the platform. Framing them as surreptitious data harvesting platforms would invite us to focus less on what we do on the platform and more on what THEY do.

因为大多数人对框架对自己行为的影响视而不见，我们往往很容易被那些掌握了有效框架艺术的人操纵。但这正是为什么广告中的真理是一项重要的道德义务。如果公司和政府被要求以使其真正功能透明的方式命名和描述事物，这将增加所谓“最终用户”的自主性和独立性。这就是我喜欢“标题党”这个可爱短语的原因之一。它完美地封装了某些内容的真正功能，在某种程度上帮助用户更自主，更有自我意识，更少受操纵和资本主义需求创造的影响。

现在，脸书、谷歌、亚马逊，以及所有依靠腐烂的隐私尸体为生的公司，都是关于资本主义的。就像全世界的优秀资本家一样，他们只是给了我们我们想要的。有人可能会说，如果我们选择放弃我们的隐私来换取浏览、冲浪和聊天的乐趣，那就这样吧。但这种思维方式对资本主义的真正逻辑是盲目的——资本主义既关注需求的创造，也关注独立存在的需求的满足——也忽视了一个事实，就像我上面说的，我们与其说是客户，不如说是这些平台销售的产品。

当然，如果我们愿意把自己变成产品，向出价最高的人出售我们的数据，就必须有一些吸引力，一些诱惑，将我们带到平台上。这意味着他们必须给我们我们想要和重视的东西。但是回到我们上面简单讨论过的“牛”这个比喻。肉类生产商的牧场对奶牛非常有吸引力，并提供奶牛想要的东西……很多很多美味的草。草是诱饵。但尽管如此，牛肉仍然是产品，而不是肉类制造商的客户。

And do not underestimate the role and importance of "demand creation" here. Cows have pretty limited and fixed desires. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how to lure cows onto the pasture. But we humans are different and much more complicated. The clever capitalist technology entrepreneur doesn’t necessarily start out by asking “What does the product (i.e. the human) independently want?” Rather, she asks "What can I GET the human product to want?" and (especially) "What can I get them to want more and more of?" Now this approach also works for would be customers and clients, as well as human commodities, whose information and data such companies are really after. But again, the ordinary Facebook user is mere commodity to Facebook, a bundle of harvestable data and information, just as a cow in the pasture is a commodity to the meat maker. The goal of Facebook is to harvest as much as they can, in any way they can get away with, from the human commodities it can lure onto its platform.

I haven’t said much about the government and its role in the erosion of privacy. I will say that unlike many others, I am at least as worried about the effects of corporations as I am about the role of governments in eroding privacy. That’s because the one saving grace of the government and its intrusions is that at least in theory, governments can be democratically regulated. Governments, at least truly democratic ones, are not entitled to treat citizens as mere commodities, on sale to the highest bidder. As such, they are a least in principle answerable to us and subject to democratic regulation by us.

Democratic regulation of corporations, especially multi-national ones that span the globe in their reach, is much harder to pull off. Of course, I admit that the idea of democratic regulation of government is good in theory but is also hard to achieve in practice. This is especially true in America, which is far less of a democracy than we like to admit. But spelling out how America’s so-called democracy falls very far short, how these shortcomings contribute to the erosion of privacy, and what, if anything we can do about it, short of forming a new American democratic republic, would open up an entirely different can of worms. So I’ll just leave it at that for now and save my fuller rant about the demise of democracy and privacy for another day.