Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 140

connections between self, personhood and privacy in mind as we chew
over the recent revelations about governmental access to Big Data. The
underlying issue is not simply a matter of balancing convenience and lib-
erty. To the extent we risk the loss of privacy we risk, in a very real sense,
the loss of our very status as subjective, autonomous persons” (2013).
When Facebook develops tools, like the social search engine Graph
Search, that combines pieces of our identity with third-party data and
then markets this information to advertisers, it takes over the space of self-
development, limits our breathing room to carry out the task of forming
an identity, and lessens our ability to develop the autonomy necessary to
live as citizens in a democratic society. It turns citizens into data points,
commodiies their identiies, reduces democracy to another act of con-
sumption, and leaves less room for genuine autonomy. Attacks on privacy
and security are not just matters of trade or abstract rights; they dimin-
ish our psychological and social well-being, a point often submerged in
debates about the impact of privacy legislation on commerce and politics.
Privacy is a perennial issue in communication, especially since the
arrival of media technologies in the mid-nineteenth century. With the
telegraph and then the telephone, people learned to trust strangers with
their secrets. One way to build trust was to promise that messages would
remain private and secure, even if that required close surveillance of those
who worked the telegraph key and delivered messages, as well as those
who took call requests at a switchboard. In the 1960s, as television was
transitioning into cable and experiments in “interactive” video previewed
a future of on-demand entertainment, people learned quickly, to the
embarrassment of some, that the systems making it all possible also kept
a record of the choices made. Later, the worry grew when video stores
kept track of rentals, irst of cassettes and then of DVDs. Questions arose
regarding the public's right to know about a politician's viewing habits,
questions that could not feasibly be raised in the “rabbit-ear” broadcast-
ing days. The Internet upped the ante by globalizing once largely local
privacy and security issues.
Cloud computing is the next step—neither a simple extension nor a
radical rupture in the challenges it poses for privacy and security. By dei-
nition the cloud raises serious concerns in these areas because it entails
moving all data from relatively well-known settings where the home
computer hard drive is under personal control or the computer at work