From an article in THE GUARDIAN this morning (the topic addressed has certainly
hampered my ability to participate in forums such as lit-ideas) :
'''Dance like no one is watching', the American journalist Olivia Nuzzi wrote
in 2014. 'Email like it may one day be read aloud in a deposition.'
...
"... the death of frank speaking is, speaking frankly, a disaster. A state, a
business, even a household, cannot operate without private conversations.
...
"The death of frankness is one symptom of the wider dearth of ambient privacy
in our daily lives. The cheery Silicon Valley surveillance state that prevents
us from speaking plainly in private is the same one that requires us to warn
our children – or be warned by our parents – not to post things online that
might harm employment prospects, and the same one that ensures we vet every
utterance to make sure that it doesn’t take on some darker meaning outside of
the context in which it was presented.
...
"... the problem is, the playing field isn’t level. There are two groups that
float on, unconcerned by the death of ambient privacy.
"The first are the angels: those whose innermost thoughts are already safely
expressible, who never need to talk behind someone’s back because what they
want to say is acceptable to deliver to their face, and who cannot have a
throwaway comment come back to bite them because every comment is perfectly
thought-out and expressed first time round.
"Such people do not exist.
"The second group are those who dismiss the very idea of consistency, who
elevate rudeness to a virtue and undermine the entire concept of a shared
reality. If you build your reputation on consistency and honesty, then a single
hypocrisy can be ruining. If you get elected as an MP after you have already
been fired from a newspaper for making up – sorry, 'sandpapering' – quotes,
then, well, you can get away with writing pretty much anything. You could even
put it on the side of a bus, couldn’t you, Boris Johnson?
" ... if, like Nigel Farage, you make a habit of telling your negotiating
partners to their faces that they have 'all the charisma of a damp rag and the
appearance of a low-grade bank clerk', how could a leaked letter possibly hurt
you? You might even suggest yourself as a successor to the clearly hopelessly
biased civil servant. You, of course, are unimpeachable: your reputation for
plain speaking is all the proof anyone needs. And for even more plain speaking,
your fans can hear you on the radio five days a week!
'The threat is not just to politics. The more we adapt to the absence of
ambient privacy, the more the world will split: the worst of us rising to the
top, their awfulness baked into their reputation and recontextualised as
courage or honesty, the rest of us retreating ever further from the public
sphere, trying to find new spaces where conversations are unarchived and
unpublished.
...
"'The infrastructure of mass surveillance is too complex, and the tech
oligopoly too powerful, to make it meaningful to talk about individual
consent,' Cegłowski concludes. 'I believe [Google’s Sundar] Pichai and
[Facebook’s Mark] Zuckerberg are sincere in their personal commitment to
privacy, just as I am sure that the CEOs of Exxon Mobil and Shell don’t want
their children to live in a world of runaway global warming. But their core
business activities are not compatible with their professed values.'
"'Our discourse around privacy needs to expand to address foundational
questions about the role of automation: to what extent is living in a
surveillance-saturated world compatible with pluralism and democracy? What are
the consequences of raising a generation of children whose every action feeds
into a corporate database? What does it mean to be manipulated from an early
age by machine-learning algorithms that adaptively learn to shape our
behaviour?'
"Individual action is important, though. It can act as a signal of support for
the wider fight. It can frighten corporations into shifting their behaviour
ever so slightly. And it can help psychologically, by fighting the creeping
feeling of uselessness.
"Download a privacy app such as Jumbo and use it to lock down your Facebook,
sanitise your Google and erase your Twitter. Switch from WhatsApp to Signal,
and from Instagram to Snapchat, and everywhere enable the ability to erase your
messages after they’ve been read. Turn off 'Hey, Siri' and 'OK, Google', and
remove Alexa from your house. Fight for frankness.
"But if you do think your email might be read aloud in a deposition, maybe
follow Nuzzi’s advice. Frankness in the wrong place is a mistake you only get
to make once."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/11/can-we-talk-in-confidence-the-death-of-candour-in-the-age-of-surveillance
Chris (not Frank) Bruce,
in Kiel, Germany
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