This kind of disaggregated, mutually anonymous news-gathering system would not be difficult to build or maintain, and by encrypting the personal details of journalists (as well as their editors) and storing their reporting in remote servers, those who stand to lose as a more independent press emerges will become increasingly immobilized. How does one retaliate against a digital platform, particularly in an age when everyone can read the news on their mobile devices? Connectivity is relatively low in many places that lack free media today, but as that changes, the reach of local reporting on sensitive matters will be even wider—international, in fact. These two trends—safer reporting backed by encryption and a wider readership due to gains in connectivity—ensure that even if a country’s legal system is too corrupt or inept to properly prosecute bad actors, they can be publicly tried online through the media. Warlords operating in eastern Congo may not all be hauled into the International Criminal Court, but their lives will become more unpleasant if their every deed is captured and chronicled by unidentifiable and unreachable journalists, and the stories written about them travel to the far ends of the online world. At a minimum, other criminals who might otherwise do business with them will be deterred by their digital radioactivity, meaning they are too visible and under too much public scrutiny to be desirable business partners.
Privacy Revisited—Different Implications for Different Citizens
Security and privacy are a shared responsibility between companies, users and the institutions around us. Companies like Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook are expected to safeguard data, prevent their systems from being hacked into and provide the most effective tools for users to maximize control of their privacy and security. But it is up to users to leverage these tools. Each day you choose not to utilize them you will experience some loss of privacy and security as the data keeps piling up. And you cannot assume there is a simple delete button. The option to “delete” data is largely an illusion—lost files, deleted e-mails and erased text messages can be recovered with minimal effort. Data is rarely erased on computers; operating systems tend to remove only a file’s listing from the internal directory, keeping the file’s contents in place until the space is needed for other things. (And even after a file has been overwritten, it’s still occasionally possible to recover parts of the original content due to the magnetic properties of disc storage. This problem is known as “data remanence” by computer experts.) Cloud computing only reinforces the permanence of information, adding another layer of remote protection for users and their information.
Such mechanisms of retention were designed to save us from our own carelessness when operating computers. In the future, people will increasingly trust cloud storage—like ATMs in banks—over physical machinery, placing their faith in companies to store some of their most sensitive information, avoiding the risks of hard-drive crashes, computer theft or document loss. This multilayer backup system will make online interactions more efficient and productive, not to mention less emotionally fraught.
Near-permanent data storage will have a big impact on how citizens operate in virtual space. There will be a record of all activity and associations online, and everything added to the Internet will become part of a repository of permanent information. The possibility that one’s personal content will be published and become known one day—either by mistake or through criminal interference—will always exist. People will be held responsible for their virtual associations, past and present, which raises the risk for nearly everyone since people’s online networks tend to be larger and more diffuse than their physical ones. The good and bad behavior of those they know will affect them positively or negatively. (And no, stricter privacy settings on social-networking sites will not suffice.)
This will be the first generation of humans to have an indelible record. Colleagues of Richard Nixon may have been able to erase those eighteen and a half minutes of a tape recording regarding the Watergate break-in and cover up, but today’s American president faces a permanent record of every e-mail sent from his BlackBerry, accessible to the public under the Presidential Records Act.
Since information wants to be free, don’t write anything down you don’t want read back to you in court or printed on the front page of a newspaper, as the saying goes. In the future this adage will broaden to include not just what you say and write, but the websites you visit, who you include in your online network, what you “like,” and what others who are connected to you do, say and share.
People will become obsessively concerned about where personal information is stored. A wave of businesses and start-ups will emerge promising to offer solutions, from present-day applications such as Snapchat, which automatically deletes a photo or message after ten seconds, to more creative solutions that also add a layer of encryption and a shorter countdown. At best, such solutions will only mitigate the risk of private information being released more broadly. Part of this is due to counter-innovations such as apps that will automatically take a screenshot of every message and photo sent faster than your brain can instruct your fingers to command your device. More scientifically, attempts to keep personal information private are always going to be defeated by attacking the analog hole, which stipulates that information must eventually be seen if it is to be consumed. As long as this holds true, there will always be the risk of someone taking a screenshot or proliferating the content.
If we are on the web we are publishing and we run the risk of becoming public figures—it’s only a question of how many people are paying attention, and why. Individuals will still have some discretion over what they share from their devices, but it will be impossible to control what others capture and share. In February 2012, a young Saudi newspaper columnist named Hamza Kashgari posted an imaginary conversation with the Prophet Muhammad on his personal Twitter account, at one point writing that “I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more.” His tweets sparked instant outrage (some people considered his posts blasphemous or a sign of apostasy, both serious sins in conservative Islam). He deleted them within six hours of posting—but not before thousands of angry responses, death threats and the creation of a Facebook group called “The Saudi People Demand Hamza Kashgari’s Execution.” Kashgari fled to Malaysia but was deported three days later to Saudi Arabia, where charges of blasphemy (a capital crime) awaited him. Despite his immediate apology after the incident and a subsequent August 2012 apology, the Saudi government refused to release him. In the future, it won’t matter whether messages like these are public for six hours or six seconds; they will be preserved as soon as electronic ink hits digital paper. Kashgari’s experience is just one of many sad and cautionary stories.
Data permanence will persist as an intractable challenge everywhere and for all people, as we said, but the type of political system and level of government control in place will greatly determine how it affects people. To examine these differences in detail, we’ll consider an open democracy, a repressive autocracy and a failed state.
In an open democracy, where free expression and responsive governance feed the public’s impulse to share, citizens will increasingly serve as judge and jury of their peers. More available data about everyone will only intensify the trends we see today: Every opinion will find space in an expansive virtual landscape, real-time updating will foster hyperactive social and civil spheres, and the ubiquity of social networking will allow everyone to play celebrity, paparazzo and voyeur, all at once. Each person will produce a voluminous amount of data about himself—his past and present, his likes and choices, his aspirations and daily habits. Like today, much of this will be “opt-in,” meaning the user deliberately chooses to share content for some undefined social or commercial reason; but some of it won’t be. Also like today, many online platforms will relay data back to companies and third parties about user activity without their express knowledge. People will share more than they’re even aware of. For governments and companies, this thriving data set is a gift, enabling them to better respond to citizen and customer concerns, to precisely target specific demographics of the population, and, with the emergent field of predictive analytics, to predict what the future will hold.5