Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
to an actual person, until expedience requires that a claim be made for the truth of that
data. Our data bodies then are repeatedly enacted as a consequence of search proce-
dures. Data is in this respect performative: the composition of flecks and bits of data
into a profile of a terror suspect, the re-grounding of abstract data in the targeting of
an actual life, will have the effect of producing that life, that body, as a terror suspect.
Countervailing Engagements
Jack Gladney, the principal character in
White Noise
, is exposed to an airborne toxin and
thereafter subjected to a battery of medical tests. The test results are then aggregated
with all of his genetic, civic, and personal information to produce a “massive data-base
tally,” the source and physical location of which are not identified.
32
Gladney considers
the conspiratorial implications: “I wondered what he meant when he said he'd tapped
into my history. Where was it located exactly? Some state or federal agency, some insur-
ance company or credit firm or medical clearinghouse?” No mere paranoid fantasy, the
idea of a single national data center as a matter of public policy was considered during
congressional hearings in 1966, with technocratic efficiency weighed against civil liber-
ties, specifically the right to privacy, and a number of representatives expressing concern
about the fact that “the computer neither forgives nor forgets” and is “incapable of
making allowances for early errors or indiscretions.”
33
As Paul Ohm has proven with
careful detail, this exact vision of a data bank that “neither forgives nor forgets” is in
theory realizable because of reidentification—the reversal of anonymization techniques
with such relative ease that anonymization cannot and should not be considered a means
of privacy protection.
34
Perfect anonymity is impossible, but the nightmare scenario
(then and now) imagines a womb-to-tomb “record prison” or “database of ruin,” a
massive “database in the sky” held by Google or elsewhere that contains the material
necessary to reduce the entropic uncertainty about individual identities and thus cause
demonstrable and legally recognized harm to everyone recorded within it. Google's
incorporation of DoubleClick, one of the largest behavioral targeting companies, as well
as its partnership with Verizon, would likely be the closest approximation of this single
database fantasy, but there is as yet no one entity legally (and technologically) capable
of aggregating the entirety of “our” data, which would include not only all governmental
and financial records but also our entire search and purchase history, along with our
relationship to the social graph. (The value at present is in the aggregating of just a few
of these data components.) It is the more general sense that data storage is permanent
