The erosion of historical notions of privacy at the hands of commerce is almost inexorable, ultimately because of Moore’s Law. You don’t need eavesdropping or other surveillance techniques when the infrastructure by which you communicate, travel, and buy things generates data as a by-product of each of these activities. This, much more than government spies, is the primary driver of lack of privacy.
The loss of privacy has been incremental. Only those of us who witnessed the time before the loss of privacy can perceive it; others born into this modern police state and indoctrinated since birth have lost the vision (or never acquired it), like being born behind the Berlin Wall as opposed to having it built in front of your eyes.
Like living in a Dean Koontz story, we see monsters.
I've been saying this for ten years: people will tell a website their name, zip code and how often they masturbate, but if the government wants to know your favorite flavor of ice cream, they suddenly invoke the Bill of Rights' protections.
The author then asks the question,
But what if I had the practical ability to charge commercial entities for access to or use of information of this sort? It would, first, go from a free good to a scarcer resource, and second, I could protect those parts of my transaction history that I feel to be most sensitive. In effect, we need a functioning market into which I can sell my transaction history.
Again, I tell people that we should all incorporate ourselves and trademark our lives as artists and claim those protections that corporations claim, that my private and web activities are trade secrets, and even my public activities are protected by copyright because I am an artist and each moment of my life has a real economic value. And we could brand ourselves and tattoo little registered trademark ® and copyright symbols © on our bodies.
But again, we lost these rights long ago, when the first of us donned that Nike logo tee-shirt and did not bill the Nike Company for our labors. We fucked up, and now we are slaves.
