The Spy in the Coffee Machine
The End of Privacy as We Know It
Published by Oneworld Publications, March 2008. ISBN 978-1-85168-554-7.
"The Spy in the Coffee Machine" is a new book by Nigel Shadbolt and Kieron O' Hara.
"Shadbolt and O'Hara have kick-started a new debate about what we mean by privacy." - Rod Liddle, Sunday Times
"Timely and balanced ... excellent and potent." - A.C. Grayling, New Scientist
"[An] entertaining survey of the issues facing us in the networked world. ... Overall ... this book will give anyone concerned about the growing number of CCTV cameras in our streets or the way young people expose their secrets on Facebook a sound appreciation of the wider issues. It will also arm them with a better ability to judge the trade-offs we are asked to make on a daily basis between public and private." - Bill Thompson, BBC Focus
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The relationship between society and technology is complex, particularly as each has unpredicatable effects on the other.. We, as technologists, can talk until we are blue in the face about what is possible, or will be possible in the next few years. That’s our favourite subject. But what will people want to use? What technologies will ‘fit into’ particular social niches? What technologies will remould society in their own images? These are tricky questions, and the correct answers can make you very rich. Wrong guesses, in a dynamic industry, can kill a firm or a reputation stone dead. Potential is huge, but not all nifty gizmos can define the future.
The need to understand these looping influences between society and technology has led to what is in effect a new discipline: Web Science. The Web is, in effect, a series of protocols defining how different computers talk to each other, but those protocols have massive real-world effects, which in turn create demands for new protocols and technologies. The aim of the recently-created Web Science Research Initiative, a joint venture between the University of Southampton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is to hone the intellectual tools to study these developmental cycles. This book is part of the Web Science programme.
There are two things that technologists can be reasonably confident about. First, given enough history (and the electronic computer now does have a decent history behind it – one of us has recently been privileged to serve as the President of the British Computer Society in its 50th year), we can identify general trends. And second, understanding what is possible will tell us what social norms and attitudes are under threat. If a technology is sufficiently widespread, and becoming more so, then it may be that a particular set of cultural or political assumptions are no longer tenable.
It is our contention that privacy, since the Enlightenment a key pillar of the liberal ideal, is one of these somewhat obsolete norms in the face of the rapid spread of information technology. Information about one can be stored, found and passed around with almost trivial ease, and it is getting increasingly hard for the subject to retain control.
This means a political rethink, for sure. But it is not our contention that we are about to descend into a Nineteen Eighty-Four-style nightmare. It is cultural determinism of the worst sort to assume that society, politics and philosophy cannot adapt to the technology, and outright pessimism to suggest that the technology cannot be brought to heel by a sufficiently vigilant, engaged and educated society.
What is true is that the twentieth-century ideal of the private space will need to evolve, and that, if we truly value our privacy, we will have to play a much more active role in keeping it in place. The technologies that threaten can also be used to protect, and awareness is an important factor in their advantageous deployment. Education is vital; so is a public spirit (some of the gains from privacy accrue more to the community as a whole than to the individual, and therefore sometimes preserving privacy is a matter of altruism or social responsibility). Fatuous claims of the ‘if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear’ sort need to be resisted just as much as the puerile conspiracy theories that plague our political discourse.
We need debate, but for that debate to be worth having we need a much greater level of awareness of the technology to be diffused throughout society. This book is a small contribution to that task.