Who Owns the Future? (44 page)

The golden rule might become hard to distinguish from ambient blackmail if blackmail really becomes ambient enough. A society-wide “mutually assured destruction” effect could motivate a mutually respectful social contract, improving security. If everyone were equally vulnerable to creepiness, then there would be less creepiness. If a lulz-seeker were always just as easy to identify and harass as a victim of online humiliation, then there would be a lot less online humiliation. It’s an interesting idea, and yet that’s neither the world we live in, nor the one we are approaching if we keep to the present course.

The problem with pretty digital utopian ideas is the Siren Server. We are not building a society of mutuality, where everyone is a first-class citizen in the information space.

The way digital networks have been designed by fashion, though not by necessity, creates ultravaluable central nodes that spawn temptations for bad actors, whether those actors are traditional legitimate players or not.

The best way to reduce temptation to act abusively is to distribute value, power, and clout less centrally. The best way to do that is to enable a more comprehensive commercial sphere than the one in place today.

CHAPTER 30

A Stab at Mitigating Creepiness

Commercial Rights Scale Online Where Civil Rights Don’t

To participate in the online world lately, such as by using Facebook, means to either renounce privacy or accept a significant burden of becoming your own programmer. You must tweak the way you connect to the various Siren Servers as best you can, in order to forestall undesired interactions between them. The data available on a social network might provide the clues to guess your password on an online store, or your struggle to get a loan might show up in a misleading way on a credit report.

Suppose, though, that any cloud computer operator, whether it is a social network, an eclectic Wall Street scheme, or even a government agency, is required to pay you for useful data that is derived from you. Any Siren Server will then have a full-fledged commercial relationship with you. You will have intrinsic, inalienable
commercial
rights to data that wouldn’t exist without you.

This means, for instance, that Facebook would be sending you little payments when data derived automatically from you helped some business successfully pitch a friend of yours to buy something. If your face shows up in an ad, you get paid. If you are tracked while you walk around town, and that helps a government become aware that pedestrian safety could be improved with better signage, you’d get a micropayment for having contributed valuable data.

Commercial rights are better suited for the multitude of quirky
little situations that will come up in real life than new kinds of civil rights along the lines of digital privacy.

There are always tricky questions about how to interpret a digital right. You probably agree that it’s still okay to be photographed in public, in a pre-network-age sense, but it also might feel creepy to have a multitude of automatically generated photographs collated in a remote server to generate a comprehensive record of everything you do in public. How do you draw the line between these two cases?

Even if a clear line can be drawn, how can a prohibition be enforced? It would be as impossible as preventing music piracy. You will never know which unseen Siren Servers are compiling dossiers. Or more specifically you will never know as long as we continue to use networks as they are built today, because information about you can be copied without a trace.

As I’ve argued earlier, a world of universal commercial information rights would also be
better
for a company like Facebook, since there are more opportunities in an expanding overall market than in a shrinking one, and companies like Facebook are currently causing more shrinkage than growth overall.

Online empires might be a little slow in catching on to their own long-term self-interests, however. So, would companies still ask you to click on a form no one ever reads that signs away commercial rights, for free, forever, as they do now? Of course they would, but since there would be real money at stake, there would be a new ecosystem of middlemen and lawyers motivated to help you retrieve the money due because of your commercial rights in exchange for a cut.

Ouch! Do we really want that world, filled with litigation? I’ll admit right out front that the future proposed here will have its annoyances, and yet I must also argue that in the long term you have to pick your poisons. The rancor of lawyers and middlemen won’t be nearly as ridiculous as the current intractable farce of attempting to set policies and prohibitions to preserve rights in unboundedly complex, unforeseen scenarios.

This proposal suggests a future in which people will have something at stake, something worth arguing about, so there will be
arguments. That is the price of not turning into lightweight fodder in someone else’s aggregation fantasies.

Commercial Rights Are Actionable

Once the data measured off a person creates a debt to that person, a number of systemic benefits will accrue. For just one example, for the first time there will be accurate accounting of who has gathered what information about whom. No amount of privacy and disclosure law will accomplish what accounting will do when money is at stake.

In the days before digital networking, we typically didn’t have to worry about petty little imbalances of information and power, because information technologies were too weak to matter. For instance, it was generally accepted that a photographer could take a picture in public without getting consent from other subjects who were also in public.

However, there was a petty power imbalance in that someone who was photographed didn’t necessarily know that a picture had been taken. The photographer had the upper hand, and photographers relished that status. Nonetheless, it was a minor inequity, occasionally leading to paparazzi tensions, but not so serious as to potentially undermine a social contract.

Networked cameras are powerful enough, however, that what used to be a minor power imbalance becomes a major one. If a company or government can know what everyone is doing always, but the observed people don’t know as much, then most people are put at a serious information disadvantage. Universal tracking by cameras, all the time, would realize one of the most familiar dark science fiction nightmares. A person raised in such a world would never know dignity.

So now that we have networked cameras, the traditional information inequity of photography is so amplified that it is no longer survivable. People now deserve to know when and how they are tracked.

And yet, how could an equitable power balance in photography be implemented, if it is to be considered only as an abstract right?
Who has the time to review all the photographs taken of oneself in public? There will be thousands, millions. What to do about the ones you feel should not be part of the records used to influence your credit, or other prospects? Do you call the police or some new type of online arbitration bureau? It is inconceivable that mankind could have the time to adjudicate information disputes in the terms of regulations and rights.

But commercial rights could be tractable. Every photo of you would be registered not only in photographers’ accounts, but also in yours. There would then be duplicate records, as there always are in business, so that fraud would become nontrivial.

More important, you would automatically share proceeds in commercial rights to any profitable use made of photographs of you, according to the policies you’ve set for “instant” transactions. Some people might choose more privacy and demand so much money as to make the use of their photographs prohibitive. Most people will choose some reasonable, conventional setting.

What that will mean is that enough people will allow themselves to be tracked to generate data for things like improving pedestrian safety, but people will still have the dignity to choose their own balance of privacy versus being tracked.

A criminal who sets a high price on his data to avoid being tracked while committing a crime will find himself owing that amount if law enforcement has to get a warrant to track him in order to gain a conviction. On the other hand, if law enforcement doesn’t get a conviction, the price of the data will be taken out of a department’s budget. This balance of power can be tweaked to find a reasonable sweet spot generally balancing police effectiveness and civil liberties protection. Maybe the police would only owe up to a fixed limit, unlike civilian actors. However, a reasonable, intermediate solution to the quandary of access to digital information would come about without requiring constant reinterpretation.

Moderation, according to terms set in advance, will strengthen both the police and civil liberties. Civil libertarians will have access to good data, since everyone will have commercial rights to their own accounts, and will have civil recourses, which are more predictable, and easier to fund.

Meanwhile, the police will be able to leverage the consistency of cloud-monitored physicality to detect criminal schemes. As pointed out earlier, you can fake an ID, but you can’t fake a thousand concurrent views of the person you are falsely pretending to be. The police will have to pay to access those views, just as they have to pay for cars and bullhorns these days. Policing should never be “free” in a democracy. All things must be balanced.

Commercial rights might be the only approach to digital privacy that opens up a path to moderation. Privacy in a humanistic economy will no longer be all-or-nothing. Instead it will cost real money to access your information. Sometimes some of your photographs might be worth accessing, other times not. All your data won’t always be available for free to the advantage of whoever has assembled the best cloud computer at the moment.

Extending the commercial sphere genuinely into the information space will lead to a more moderate, balanced world. What we’ve been doing instead is treating information commerce as a glaring exception to the equity that underlies democracy.

The Ideal Price of Information Equals the Minimization of Creepiness

Some libertarian idealists would prefer that markets be freed from regulators. Let’s for a moment, though, assume that a regulatory function will still find a place in the economies of the future.

In that case, a regulator might seek a principle for tweaking policies to make sure that information isn’t becoming too cheap or too expensive overall. If it were to become too expensive, not only would less successful people be thrown into a vicious circle of disenfranchisement, but the economy could also stall because innovation would become too expensive. If information becomes too cheap, the Siren Server pattern could reappear, which would lead to massive unemployment and economic contraction. As always, a sweet spot is found approximately, somewhere in the middle.

A good measure of the sweet spot would be the amount of creepiness. The correct price of information should be the price at which
a Siren Server can make no money without adding value to the information it has gathered, but the price should not be so high that adding value can’t generate a profit. (An excessive price would mean upstream players are exerting blackmail-like influence.) In other words, the right price minimizes creepiness.

In the world foreseen in this book, a Siren Server of any type would have to pay for the information gathered about you proportionally to the value of that information, as determined by expectations for future transactions. “Spying” on you would still occur, especially when you are the customer for a service related to you. However, in the event a company offers you something worth paying for over the network, that success would have to be based primarily on some creation of value beyond spying, based on the unique competence of the seller.

Nothing is outlawed in the scenario imagined here. No moralists or absolutists have descended on business, tsk-tsking about privacy. There are no boycotts or shunnings. Neither are there mad campaigns by entrepreneurs to grab as much of what had been private data as possible, as we now endure from credit agencies or companies like Facebook. Instead a path of moderation appears where previously there was only black-and-white.

Individual Players Will Also Be Motivated to Set Prices to Minimize Creepiness

There will still be buyers of influence, like the so-called advertisers Google and Facebook are fighting over these days, but they’ll have to take into account the cost of the information they’ve measured off of you in order to influence you, and the cost of that information will be proportional to its value. Simply spying on you to manipulate you—into paying more than your neighbors for the same thing, for instance, with no other added value—will cease to be a commercial option.

This is a subtler concept than it might seem to be at first glance. You’ll set the price of information that exists because you exist. More likely, you’ll pay a service to do that, since it would be a hassle
to constantly worry about it. What should the price be? Make it too high and no one will buy. Make it too low and you’re not making as much as you might be able to.

The ideal price of data would remove the profit from buying access to data for its own sake. The profit would then have to come from adding value.

If a Siren Server can spend a dollar to peek at data that manipulates you to spend an extra two dollars, then the server will earn a dollar profit. However, a “what if” calculation will have automatically been performed to calculate that, and will determine that actually you are owed a significant royalty on the use of your own information once it is put to a profitable purpose, even if that purpose is to manipulate you.

So you might get a rebate of, say seventy-five cents. The Siren Server might be motivated to lobby politicians to change the rules to make this transaction turn out less in your favor, but then there would be many other transactions that would also turn out less in the Siren Server’s favor, since it is playing fundamentally the same game you are playing. You and the server are both first-class citizens, with a common stake in the same set of rules.