Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 138

some simpliication, consider three alternatives that range from weak to
strong privacy protections. Starting at the weak end, one can view privacy
and security as tradable commodities. We believe in the right to be left
alone and to feel secure but are willing to give up some of the protections
afforded in order to achieve other goals. This increasingly includes the
decision to trade some of our privacy and security to live in the cloud by
posting on Facebook or Twitter and downloading videos from Apple's
iCloud. For the ability to do these things, we risk losing some of our
identity to hackers or giving up information about ourselves, including
the content of our postings or the proile established by our purchases,
to the companies that provide the service, as well as to outside parties
that purchase information about us from Facebook, Twitter, and Apple.
Sometimes the deal with a cloud provider is not clear. I know a person
who, after letting her Facebook friends know about a serious illness,
began receiving ads for “bucket lists.” Of course, she wasn't looking for
a bucket list when she gave up some of her privacy in order to let friends
know about her health issue. Nor was the person who started receiving
ads for multiple sclerosis support services after doing an online search of
sites devoted to the condition (Singer 2013). The outcome is not always
this offensive, but it can also be worse, as when innocent online searches
for pressure cookers and backpacks led to a home visit from six members
of a terrorism task force, who, we soon learned, regularly check on people
whose use of the Internet provokes suspicion (Bump 2013). Whether the
deal is clear or not, in this irst view, privacy and security are among the
several things we desire, and we make choices about them in the context
of other things we want.
In the middle of the continuum, privacy and security are no longer
tradable commodities; rather, they are untradable values that deine a
citizen's right to be left alone and secure from violations. From this per-
spective, there is no trade-off in money, services, or goods because privacy
and security are not commodities. Rather they are rights to freedom from
identity loss and from physical or mental violation. Seen from this point
of view, law and custom should protect the right to be left alone, which
cannot be taken away without violating a right of citizenship and therefore
cannot be traded for money, goods, or services. When Google, Amazon,
or Microsoft tracks us, we lose some of our privacy. What we appear to
get in return is actually unrelated to privacy. It is a service provided by the