The future's bright, with the possibility of showers

Calling young people. I need your thoughts.

SF author and one-time roommate (for one memorable week) Charles Stross has published an interesting talk he gave on ‘Shaping the Future’, in which he extrapolates growth in technological ability and changing attitudes towards privacy, and draws some not entirely optimistic conclusions. Not entirely pessimistic either, mind you. A couple of key passages:

“If it's an offense to pick your nose in public, someone, sooner or later, will write a 'bot to hunt down nose-pickers and refer them to the police. Or people who put the wrong type of rubbish in the recycling bags. Or cross the road without using a pedestrian crossing, when there's no traffic about. If you dig hard enough, everyone is a criminal. In the UK, today, there are only about four million public CCTV surveillance cameras; I'm asking myself, what is life going to be like when there are, say, four hundred million of them? ... [snip] ... One of the biggest risks we face is that of sleep-walking into a police state, simply by mistaking the ability to monitor everyone for even minute legal infractions for the imperative to do so.”

It’s a conclusion that follows logically from his premises. But here’s a key passage from earlier in the talk:

“Our concept of privacy relies on the fact that it's hard to discover information about other people. Today, you've all got private lives that are not open to me. Even those of you with blogs, or even lifelogs. But we're already seeing some interesting tendencies in the area of attitudes to privacy on the internet among young people, under about 25; if they've grown up with the internet they have no expectation of being able to conceal information about themselves. They seem to work on the assumption that anything that is known about them will turn up on the net sooner or later, at which point it is trivially searchable.”

Assumption. Right. In any argument, it’s the assumptions that are important.

I started my personal web site in 1996, on the basis that if I was destined to become a world famous author then I should give the fans something to satisfy their craving for More Ben. Still working on it. I remember hearing one friend describing it to another as: “you can learn everything there is to know about Ben!” And I thought – no, you can learn everything I choose to let you know about Ben. (The second friend remained net-sceptical until, later in the same conversation, he was shown how to track down the website of Barnsley FC, whereupon he converted.)

I certainly put up more information on the site than I might usually divulge at a first face-to-face meeting, but it still didn’t contain anything that wouldn’t soon become apparent in a more than passing acquaintance. Eleven years and a blog later, we’re in the same situation. I may come over all friendly and chatty here in cyberspace, but unless you already know me personally you probably don’t know the names of my wife or stepson. Or my address. Or where the Boy goes to school. Or my bank details. And so on. And you need to know me very well indeed to know details about my extended family – parents, siblings etc.

So, someone might work on the assumption that anything knowable about me is available on the net, but they will be disappointed.

But of course, I am not Young People. I’m almost half my grandmother’s age, which is a scary thought. You Young Things have Bebo and MySpace and apparently you fill it up with all sorts of crap stuff that helps you ‘hook up’ (whatever that means).

Believe it or not I have a MySpace profile; I had to sign up to leave a comment on a friend’s blog. The friend in question is one of the least MySpatial people you can think of so I’m not quite sure what he was doing. According to my profile I have one friend. Not the friend whose blog I was looking at. This friend is called Tom. I have no idea who he is; he seems to have been randomly assigned to me by Murdoch’s Minions. His profile includes the helpful note that he may have been there when I signed up and if I want I can get rid of him. Well, I dunno. If I only have one friend then maybe I should hang onto him. My peculiar notion that I’m well able to choose my own friends, thank you, in my own space and time may just be a hallucination.

More Charlie:

“Now, in this age of rapid, transparent information retrieval, what happens if you've got a lifelog, registering your precise GPS coordinates and scanning everything around you? If you're updating your whereabouts via a lightweight protocol like Twitter and keeping in touch with friends and associates via a blog? It'd be nice to tie your lifelog into your blog and the rest of your net presence, for your personal convenience. And at first, it'll just be the kids who do this — kids who've grown up with little expectation of or understanding of privacy. Well, it'll be the kids and the folks on the Sex Offenders Register who're forced to lifelog as part of their probation terms, but that's not our problem. Okay, it'll also be people in businesses with directors who want to exercise total control over what their employees are doing, but they don't have to work there ... yet.”

So here’s my question to young people. Do you have these reduced expectations of privacy? Does it even occur to you that you don’t have to put everything about you out on the net, and it’s quite easy not to? ’Cos if we do end up in a future like this, I don't think it will be you lot who put us there. It will be our present generation of technophile, how-can-we-possibly-be-wrong-I-mean-we're-Christian politicians. It will be up to you lot to sort it out.

This is an optimistic assessment that I make based on the personalities and my estimation of the intelligence of the teenagers I know (friends of the real-life, reach-out-and-touch-them variety). But what do your classmates think? What’s the word on the street in yo’ hip with-it well-happenin’ world?

Go.