On the all-seeing eye - Sue Halpern in NYRB:

‘In the fall of 2020, images of a woman using the toilet in her own home, taken by a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, began circulating on Facebook. How they ended up on the social media site was not surprising: someone with access to the company’s data files had leaked them. How that person came to possess them also was not remarkable: Roomba was having some of its vacuum cleaners take photographs as they roamed through customers’ homes in order to “train” the machines’ artificial intelligence systems to recognize furniture and cats and dog bowls and other objects of daily living. But since vacuum cleaners can’t train themselves (yet), the images needed actual humans to identify and label those objects, and it appears that one of the workers who came across the photos of the woman in her bathroom took the liberty of sharing them. According to a spokesperson for Roomba, the woman—and others using the vacuums—had consented to having them snap random photos inside their homes. But it is highly unlikely that those consumers also consented to having images of their home life posted and shared on Facebook.’

(…)

‘In The Fight for Privacy she writes, for example, of South Korea, where cameras hidden in hair-dryer holders, wall sockets, and television sets secretly filmed 1,600 guests at forty-two motels. She points to China, where it is not unusual for men to take “up-skirt” photos of women, and to Australia, which saw a 249 percent increase in nonconsensual pornography in the midst of the Covid pandemic. Citron is a law professor at the University of Virginia, a MacArthur Fellow, and the vice-president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, which advocates against online abuse. Her book is a reminder that our bodies, especially the bodies of women and girls, have become fair game for all kinds of online offenses, and that our most private behaviors, desires, and relationships can be exploited using digital media.’

(…)

‘There is no explicit constitutional right to privacy in American jurisprudence. At best, privacy is protected by a hodgepodge of common law findings as well as by protections embedded in the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments of the Bill of Rights. The latter form what the Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965)—which allowed married couples to purchase contraceptives—called a “penumbra” of privacy. Tort law has also been used to assert privacy claims, since some torts, such as misappropriation of one’s image or identity and the publication of private facts that portray someone in a “false light,” are meant to protect an individual’s sovereignty and reputation. But in no case is a right to privacy settled law.’

(…)

‘Still, the effort to distinguish between private and public citizens can be fraught. Do we need to know, for example, that someone who teaches elementary school during the week is a drag queen on the weekends? Some parents (as well as, say, evangelical Christians and QAnon adherents) might think so; the rest of us might not. Conversely, is it the obligation of the press to “out” a senator who votes against gay rights but is known to hire male escorts and frequent leather bars, when that senator wants to keep his sexual identity hidden? A dogmatic belief in the primacy of privacy over publicity, Gajda cautions, can be appropriated by the powerful to operate outside of public view, which in turn can reinforce their power. (Not surprisingly, she cites Donald Trump’s efforts to conceal his tax returns.) What distinguishes the digital age we now inhabit is that anyone with a computer or a cell phone and access to the Internet can be a “publisher” simply by sharing things on social media and other sites (like Pornhub). And anyone, even children, can be the subject of their posts. The old, if porous, distinction between a prominent person and what Warren and Brandeis called “ordinary” individuals no longer applies.’

(…)

‘This has been exacerbated by the Internet of Things, which has introduced all sorts of “smart” appliances into our homes that are collecting data on our activities, and Internet-connected wearable devices like sleep monitors and sport watches. A sex toy company called We-Vibe, for instance, obtains and stores data on when, how often, and at what speed individuals use its vibrators. Smart speakers like Amazon’s Alexa record, store, and share private conversations with the company. Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri, has been known to record (and send back to the company) the sounds of people having sex.
Pharmacies sell their customers’ prescription information to data brokers; those data brokers know who has HIV and who has searched the Internet for abortion services. (That information may be used to take legal action against people in states with the most restrictive abortion laws.) Citron writes about how pregnant women on public assistance are often required by state Medicaid rules to provide reams of private information, such as their histories of sexual assault, abortion, and drug use: Even if they don’t seek public assistance for prenatal care, they will be subject to government surveillance. If women come to a public hospital for delivery without having received prenatal care, then the hospital will likely hold the infant until the state inspects the woman’s home and finds her competent to raise her child.
The surveillance economy that has grown up around the Internet and the free pass given to companies that run social media and other web-based platforms have dramatically curtailed the possibility of being “let alone,” even in our offline lives, where our behaviors are still being monitored and our personal data continues to be collected. (This is in the United States; the European Union has much more stringent rules and regulations, including the right to be forgotten in Internet search databases if they call up personal information that serves no public purpose.) As Citron shows in example after example, there are few, if any, remedies for people whose lives have been upended by false, misleading, compromising, or threatening words and images circulating on the Internet. So what is to be done?’

(…)

‘It’s an appealing idea, but short of an act of Congress, it’s unclear how intimate privacy could be folded into civil rights law, especially now that Republican lawmakers and a deeply conservative Supreme Court appear to have little interest in protecting the civil rights that are currently on the books. Meanwhile in states across the country, the right wing has been actively passing laws to police citizens’ private lives, in some states, notably Texas and Oklahoma, deputizing citizens to spy on each other, with the promise of a bounty for doing so. Indeed, privacy has never seemed more contested, and more out of reach.’

Read the article here.

Once upon a time only our neighbors were spying on us, and our children, our significant others, and our bosses.

For a while now, our gadgets have been spying on us as well. (And the mortals behind the gadgets, let’s not blame the gadgets.)

We don’t need Pegasus to turn them into spies, they are spies already.

It’s unclear if we can solve this problem by making the companies behind social media responsible for the content posted on their outlets.

But doing nothing is not a solution either.

Regulation of the internet without a world government (see also under: taxes, climate etc.) remains an uphill battle, to say the least.