If an e-mail lies on a hard drive, does it make a sound?
In attempting to expand my thoughts on what we imagine surveillers might do recently, I considered starting with the question: if an e-mail lies on a hard drive, does it make a sound? My purpose was to challenge the centrality of data collection in debates about privacy and surveillance. If data about someone is collected on a computer, but no human ever looks at it, is that person's privacy invaded?
I happened to be reading Steve Talbott's Devices of the Soul (2006) this week, which gives an answer in a chapter entitled Privacy in an Age of Data. Talbott argues that privacy is properly conceived as being a property possessed by a person, and that the privacy of data is therefore meaningless or at least beside the point. He goes on to say that
the ideal of privacy gains substance only in those primary contexts where we know each other well enough to care (p. 233; emphasis in original).Read in the context of the question above, I take this as a "no".
Talbott takes a somewhat mystical view of humanity, and elsewhere lambasts scientific materialists like Richard Dawkins and Rodney Brooks as "reductionists" for holding that humans are made up of chemicals. In this view, maybe machines can never invade privacy because they don't "care". But, shorn of any mysticism, I take the point to be that privacy only has meaning amongst entities that interact with each other and can make choices about the relationship. Mere knowledge of someone else, without any capacity to have an effect on that person, is simply data.
This tallies with what I experience when I read sordid news stories. Given that I've never met the people involved, and nor am I likely to, I simply take on board the information that people did the things that they're reported to have done. Not because I'm a machine (even if Rodney Brooks et al. are right), but because I have no relationship with those people and no direct capacity to either influence them or be influenced by them. But I doubt that I would react the same way if someone I knew was involved in the same sorts of activities.
But do the subjects of sordid news stories, being on the other side of the experience, feel the same way? I read in the Sydney Morning Herald this weekend that Britain's Prince William and Kate Middleton have accused two photographers of "surveilling" their son (Paparazzi warned off pursuing George, 4 October 2014, p. 26). Prince George presumably isn't involved in anything more sordid than dirty nappies, but his parents clearly aren't happy with some of the attention he's been getting.
I'm not a royal-watcher and I can't speak for what kind of relationship royal-watchers think they're in with the family. The royals themselves, I suppose, are in some sort of relationship with the public or at least the media, and perhaps this relationship is the source of their frustration. They are, after all, affected by the public's and the media's treatment of them. (I've often wondered what I'd feel like upon reading about myself in the news but have never had the opportunity to find out.)
Getting back to my hypothetical e-mail, one can imagine a computer system that collects e-mails but takes no action unless a human explicitly asks for it. In fact, traditional e-mail systems work something like this, and I've never heard anyone complain that their privacy has been invaded by an SMTP or IMAP server. I doubt that even Google or the NSA pays human voyeurs to dig through the stuff that they collect.
Of course Google and other ad-supported services do take action on the data they collect; they use it to select the advertisements to be shown to each user. Intelligence agencies use selected information to pursue investigations and make arrests. I'm nonetheless pretty sure that the computer systems involved don't "care" in any human sense, but I'm also sure that critics would say that this is not the point. So does my e-mail make a sound?
