Protect our Privacy...for our own Security

A recent issue of the Scientific American talks about the need for privacy from an interesting ethical and engineering perspective.

Privacy is needed by..."a lion that sees a deer down at a lake and it can't let the deer know he's there or [the deer] might get a head start on him. And he doesn't want to announce to the other lions [what he has found] because that creates competition. There's a primal need for secrecy so we can achieve our goals."

Privacy is also necessary for individuals to be allowed room to make mistakes and to grow. Just as a child stumbles while trying to walk, he is taught to enjoy the experience and grow with the encouragement from parents. This is based on the universal principles of repentance and forgiveness. Societies that have room for such principles to be practicable are more likely to flourish since people would not be afraid of being branded a failure but to learn from their mistakes. Bankruptcy laws are a good example of a mechanism which allows a person to recover in spite of failed attempts.

Too many systems are engineered to collect information, without regard to how the data will be used or it's relevance after a certain time period. The marketing department will always ask for more data about customers, demographics, behaviour, etc. It is also relatively simple to satisfy requirements for data collection given the computing capacity we have for storage and analysis. But in spite of the data gathering and analysis capability, there's too many instances when marketing is still done with the sophistication of telemarketing...mobile advertising being the main culprit.

In a Scientific American interview, Latanya Sweeney, makes an excellent point that "the privacy problems that I've seen are probably best solved by the person who first created the technology. What we really have to do is train engineers and computer scientists to design and build technologies in the right kind of way from the beginning."

So far, making engineers aware of human computer interfaces is only just beginning to show results with the recognition given to products that enhance usability. The next step, to make engineers aware of acceptance and social adoption requires them to think of barriers to technology. We already engineer systems that refrain from intruding on personal physical space. We are quite capable of engineering systems to enhance people's mental capacity and productive use of time. However, too many engineers presume that when systems intrude into people's privacy and temporal space, there are justifiable benefits but do not offer users a viable means to choose to opt-out of those "benefits".