"There's no business for the state in the bedrooms of the nation," Pierre Trudeau once famously declared.
He was right 47 years ago but the bedrooms have become much more crowded since then. The state is back more than ever and it brought law enforcement and big business along. When Trudeau uttered those famous lines in 1967, personal privacy was a tangible thing and worth protecting. Today, the very notion is in tatters, mostly because citizens voluntarily surrendered their privacy rights for online amusement and convenience.
Some people were shocked a couple of weeks ago when U2 released its new album, Songs of Innocence, free to iTunes customers. It was also automatically downloaded to the music library of all iPhones. Strangely, some people found it inappropriate for Apple to add content to their devices without getting permission from the phone's user first. Notice the word "user" instead of "owner" to describe the relationship of the individual with the electronic device. Whether it is Microsoft's XBox, Sony's Playstation or smartphones from Apple, Samsung or Blackberry, individuals are not buying ownership of this electronic equipment. They are buying the rights to use it and only in authorized ways. The operating systems and the actual guts belong to the manufacturer as proprietary content, so users are technically not allowed to make custom changes or improvements without the explicit consent of the copyright holder.
Furthermore, Apple users seemed willfully blind to the fact that one of the world's largest corporations has permission to add and delete content on its devices whenever and however it pleases. How else does Apple know when updates are needed on its iPhones or even on PCs running iTunes? The phone or the iPod or the iPad may be in your hands or sitting on the night table in your bedroom but Apple never lets go of it.
This is not an attack on Apple because they all do it, they being all of the major electronics manufacturers, as well as Google, Facebook, Netflix and every other major online content provider. Netflix tracks viewing patterns so it can make recommendations to its subscrbers of other shows they might like. It even shares their preferences to their friends if they let it. Meanwhile, invisible to its customers, Netflix is crunching metadata on its customers that is worth its weight in gold when packaged and sold for marketing purposes to other companies. Not only do people not even have privacy anymore, they don't even own their private information. That belongs to these companies to use as they wish.
As Tim Wu explains in his book The Master Switch, governments love how willingly people surrendered privacy rights to corporations. It has allowed governments to spy on its own citizens by demanding these companies share their data or face unwanted regulations, additional oversight and anti-trust challenges. In other words, government is fine with the corporate eradication of individual privacy, so long as the data gets passed along into the hands of law enforcement and spy agencies.
That's not paranoid science fiction behind a Jason Bourne or James Bond plot. The documents released by Edward Snowden and others clearly show the depth of the government/corporate relationship over personal data. Corporations claims they are using the data to provide better service. While that may be true, they are also taking information freely provided by their customers and making a fortune selling it. Governments claim they are using the data for safety and security. While that also may be true, they are also using it to preserve power and squash dissent.
Furthermore, the data only has limited value in preventing crimes and attacks because it only has significance in hindsight, in the context of the crimes, rather than as a signal something is about to happen. The Boston Marathon bombing still happened, Luka Magnotta still escaped to Europe and Cody Legebokoff still lured Loren Leslie into his orbit using social media.
Sadly, the situation won't change. There is too much money for corporations and too much authority for governments for either to willingly surrender the cozy spots they occupy in the bedrooms and back pockets of the nation.
