 Arthur C. Clarke, the great 20th century science-fiction writer, once imagined a world where privacy no longer exists after a media company markets an atom-sized camera that can be dispatched anywhere without being detected. Want to be a fly on the wall during national security conversations? Done. Need to verify your teenager’s actual whereabouts? Simple. Curious to know what your friends say about you when you’re not around? Answered. Setting the sci-fi aside, the concept itself – a privacy-destroying technology hiding in plain sight – is about to be proved frighteningly real. In Clarke's story, The Light of Other Days, the media company that invented the invasive tech is called OurWorld. In our world, that company is called Meta. More on that in a moment. First, back to Clarke’s story, co-authored with writer Stephen Baxter. The complete loss of privacy led some groups to declare camera-free privacy zones, but those don’t work when a technology is incapable of being detected or regulated. Other reactions were more pathological. Some people chose suicide, others self-imposed isolation and, of course, every imaginable form of anxiety and psychological distress came to the fore. And pretty much everyone became paranoid by varying degrees. It turned out, in fact, that the opposite of privacy is paranoia. Humans really need their secrets, and not just the people with something to hide. In the real and present day, Meta has created its own version of a camera that hides in plain sight – Meta Ray-Ban sunglasses. Now in their third generation, the critical reception suggests that they’re here to stay. Two million have already been sold, and those were before the third-version gamechanger that’s about to be rolled out. Meta’s goal is to sell 10 million smartglasses a year by 2027. No prescription required. If you’re thinking, “So, what? I’m never buyin’ a pair of those,” technology and culture critic John Mac Ghlionn says you’re missing the point. It’s not about who’s wearing them. It’s about who’s wearing them while watching and listening to you. “Imagine walking down a street and having your face scanned by a dozen pairs of AI glasses, your expressions analyzed, your emotional state catalogued by strangers in real time.” In Ghlionn’s mind – and we’re inclined to agree – this is a seismic shift. Other media revolutions were shared, public experiences – whether books, magazines, film, or television. Even social media is public. They were visible, vied for our attention, and were meant to be shared. Meta smartglasses are the opposite of all of that. It’s personal surveillance tech. To quote Ghlionn at length: “These aren’t just toys. They’re tools – and weapons. They comprise a camera, microphone, an AI interface and internet access, all embedded discreetly in eyewear. They are capable of recognizing faces, interpreting language, overlaying information in real-time and collecting vast swaths of data as their owners simply walk down the street. They can whisper comprehensive summaries about the stranger across the subway, translate foreign speech in real time, suggest pickup lines, record interactions without consent.” How can we possibly manage our personal privacy in such a world? Do you declare that a business dinner with important clients is a “smartglasses-free zone”? What if your partner, already an avid Facebook and Instagram user, takes the next logical step in Mark Zuckerberg’s calculus and buys a pair? Now you will never be able to tell your significant other – “I didn’t say that!” He or she can now play your words back for you. Privacy was always going to be easier in an analog world, before the age of connectivity and digitization that have come to characterize the 21st century. In the before times, you could shut a door. “Records” were physical things that could be kept under lock and key. Surreptitiously snapping a picture of someone required a degree of stealth similar to that of an assassin. As human civilization transitioned into the digital age, traditional notions of privacy got lost in translation. Margaret O’Mara wrote in her 2018 New York Times essay that today’s problem with data privacy began when we first started passing privacy legislation in the 1960s, which was aimed at regulating the collection of data. Those early legislators didn’t stop to ask whether data should be collected in the first place. In other words, she says, from that moment on, it became a question of data transparency rather than data restriction. But seven years later, Meta’s new project is a quantum leap even beyond social media. Transparency? That’s so 2018. If only we’d answered that question and the ones before it when we had the chance. Because what’s about to happen will not test the limits or nature of privacy, but the very idea of privacy itself. And how will we respond when the world around us is, by design, looking at, listening to, and recording us, everywhere and always? The psychological and social consequences of pervasive surveillance are unpredictable but sure to be profound. Perhaps most of all, new customs and social norms will be needed. Otherwise, as Clarke wrote: “As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.” Comments are closed.
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