Privacy and truth

Wired featured an article today about monitoring of sex offenders. Since Megan's law was passed states are required to notify residents when a sex offender moves into their neighborhood. Meanwhile Derek Smith of ChoicePoint, a data warehousing company, is calling for increased mining of personal data to screen the good from the bad - his company performs over 8 million background checks for Fortune 500 companies every year.

California has no central system to manage its Megan's law disclosures this so cities are simply posting names and addresses of sex offenders on their web sites. Unfortunately sometimes the wrong names and addresses are published, and sometimes a person who is trying reform and live out the rest of their life with some shred of decency finds a vigilante at their door...

ChoicePoint was the company that supplied the list of names to Florida for purging of ex-felons from their 2000 electoral roll. Unfortunately they included the names of thousands of people who only had a misdemeanor conviction, thousands who were convicted outside of Florida and thousands more who simply shared a similar name to those who were ex-felons...

Well its better to be safe than sorry right? Well what about when its your door that vigilantees turn up at, or when its you that's turned away from the polling booth?

To be honest I don't know what the answer is, I don't even have a clue. I understand the rationale that leads people to want to know when a convicted paedophile is living next door - its a known factor that recidivism exists and that incarceration as a "cure" for crime is signifcantly flawed. And I understand why people want to do background checks on people to see if they are suitable for employment - people do lie on resumes. But its also a known fact that data contains errors, courts make errors, identities are forged or confused, and sometimes people do reform and change their ways. So we end up with people effectively convicted in society for life by some record of their past deeds that may or may not be accurate or relevant.

What is society to do? Do we continue to protect privacy at all costs and rely on people telling the truth? Or do we just tear down the walls of privacy and collect, sort, collate and analyse every scrap of information on our neighbors just in case...

Its hardly a question I need answer because the latter is already happening. It is, as they say, a slippery slope. With the first taste of data fresh on its lips there is little we can do to persuade the government to put the privacy genie back in the bottle. Even though constitutionally protected, it is only a matter of time before we are expected to yield more and more personal data, and allow its collection and monitoring in return for privileges such as social security benefits, medical treatment, education, employment, purchasing property, performing any kind of financial transaction, and ultimately to live in this country at all.

We will soon reach the point where data collected and stored will include every cent you spend, every web site you visit, every phone call you make, every person you meet, every product you buy and every place you travel. It does sound far fetched but the technology to do this exists right now, and ultimately you just have to trust those in charge of that they do the right thing with it and never screw up and their computers never get hacked and they never make a wrong association and decide to shut your life down and haul you in one day. Well you can protest your innocence until you're blue in the face but who is going to argue when the truth about you is all there in black and white?

Like I said, I really don't have any answers. I do understand why people are tempted to errode our right to privacy one piece at a time. Each individual step seems to make sense and seems to have some tangible benefit that makes it a worthwhile sacrifice. Then one day you wake up and its 1984 or some society like in "The Minority Report" and you wonder just how the heck you got there. The only solution I can possibly think of is that society devote some serious effort into technology like the truth machine in Halperin's novel of the same name. In fact its no coincidence that the main character of "The Truth Machine" was inspired by the death of his own brother at the hands of an ex-murderer who never should have been released. Not that I believe such a device could ever be made to be 100% infalible, as it needs to be, but read the book and I think you'll agree that the questions raised by the existance of such a device offer some interesting insights into society and how we deal with truth and privacy.