As we said earlier, never before will so much data be available to so many people. Citizens will draw conclusions about one another from accurate and inaccurate sources, from “legitimate” sources like LinkedIn profiles and “illegitimate” ones like errant YouTube comments long forgotten. More than a few aspiring politicians will fall on their swords as past behavior documented online is later brought to light. Certainly, with time, the normalization trend that softened public attitudes toward leaders’ infidelity or past drug use—who can forget President Bill Clinton’s caveat that he “didn’t inhale”?—will take hold. Perhaps the voting public will shrug off a scandalous post or photo based on a time stamp that predates the candidate’s eighteenth birthday. Public acceptance for youthful indiscretions documented on the Internet will move a few paces forward, but probably not until a painful liminal period passes. In some ways, this is the logical next stage of an era characterized by the loss of heroes. What began with mass media and Watergate will continue into the new digital age, where even more data about individuals, from nearly every part of their lives, is available for scrutiny. The fallibility of humans over a lifetime will provide an endless stream of details online to puncture mythical hero status.
Any would-be professional, particularly one in a position of trust, will have to account for his past if he is to get ahead. Would it matter to you if your family physician spent his weekends typing long screeds against immigrants, or if your son’s soccer coach spent his twenties working as a tour guide in Bangkok’s red-light district? This granular level of knowledge about our peers and leaders will produce unanticipated consequences within society. Documented pasts will affect many people in the workplace and in day-to-day life, and some citizens will spend their entire lives acutely aware of the potentially volatile parts of their lives, wondering what might surface online one day.
In democratic countries, corruption, crime and personal scandals will be more difficult to get away with in an age of comprehensive citizen engagement. The amount of information about people that enters the public domain—tax records, flight itineraries, phone geo-location sites (global-positioning-system data collected by a user’s mobile phone) and so much more, including what is revealed through hacking—will undoubtedly provide countless suspicious citizens with more than enough to go on. Activists, watchdog groups and private individuals will work hand in hand to hold their leaders to account, and they’ll have the tools necessary to determine whether what their government tells them is the truth. Public trust may initially fall, but it will emerge stronger as the next generation of leaders takes these developments into consideration.
When the scope of such changes becomes fully realized, large portions of the population will demand government action to protect personal privacy, at a much louder volume than anything we hear today. Laws will not change the permanence of digital information, but sensible regulations can install checks that will ensure some modicum of privacy for citizens who seek it. Today’s government officials, with a few exceptions, don’t understand the Internet—not its architecture or its manifold uses. This will change. In ten years, more politicians will understand how communication technologies work and how they empower citizens and other nongovernmental actors. The result will be public figures in government who can lead more informed debates on issues of privacy, security and user protection.
In democracies in the developing world, where both democratic institutions and technology are newer, government regulation around privacy will be more random. In each country, a particular incident will initially raise the issues at stake in dramatic fashion and drive public demand, similar to what has happened in the United States. A federal statute was passed in 1994 prohibiting state departments of motor vehicles from sharing personal information after a series of high-profile abuses of that information, including the murder of a prominent actress by a stalker. In 1988, following the leak of the late Judge Robert Bork’s video-rental information during the Supreme Court nomination process, Congress passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, criminalizing disclosure of personally identifiable rental information without customer consent.6
While all of this digital chaos will be a nuisance to democratic societies, it will not destroy the democratic system. Institutions and polities will be left intact, if slightly battered. And once democracies determine the appropriate laws to regulate and control new trends, the result may even be an improvement, with a strengthened social contract and greater efficiency and transparency in society. But this will take time, because norms are not quick to change, and each democracy will move at its own pace.
Without question, the increased access to people’s lives that the data revolution brings will give some repressive autocracies a dangerous advantage in targeting their citizens.
While this is a bad outcome and one we hope will be mitigated by developments discussed elsewhere in the book, we must understand that citizens living in autocracies will have to fight even harder for their privacy and security. Rest assured, demand for tools and software to help safeguard citizens living under digital repression will give rise to a growing and aggressive industry. And that is the power of this new information revolution: For every negative, there will be a counterresponse that has the potential to be a substantial positive. More people will fight for privacy and security than look to restrict it, even in the most repressive parts of the world.
But authoritarian regimes will put up a vicious fight. They will leverage the permanence of information and their control over mobile and Internet service providers to create an environment of heightened vulnerability for their citizens. What little privacy existed before will be long gone, because the handsets that citizens have with them at all times will double as the surveillance bugs regimes have long wished they could put in people’s homes. Technological solutions will protect only a distinct technically savvy minority, and only temporarily.
Regimes will compromise devices before they are sold, giving them access to what everybody says, types and shares in public and in private. Citizens will be oblivious to how they might be vulnerable to giving up their own secrets. They will accidentally provide usable intelligence on themselves—particularly if they have an active online social life—and the state will use that to draw damning conclusions about who they are and what they might be up to. State-initiated malware and human error will give regimes more intelligence on their citizens than they could ever gather through non-digital means. Networks of citizens, offered desirable incentives by the state, will inform on their fellows. And the technology already exists for regimes to commandeer the cameras on laptops, virtually invade a dissident’s home without his or her knowledge, and both listen to and watch everything that is said and done there.