Fergie's Tech Blog

21st Century Wiretapping: Your Dog Sees You Naked

Ed Felten writes over on Freedom to Tinker:

Suppose the government were gathering information about your phone calls: who you talked to, when, and for how long. If that information were made available to human analysts, your privacy would be impacted. But what if the information were made available only to computer algorithms?

A similar question arose when Google introduced its Gmail service. When Gmail users read their mail, they see advertisements. Servers at Google select the ads based on the contents of the email messages being displayed. If the email talks about camping, the user might see ads for camping equipment. No person reads the email (other than the intended recipient) — but Google’s servers make decisions based on the email’s contents.

Some people saw this as a serious privacy problem. But others drew a line between access by people and by computers, seeing access by even sophisticated computer algorithms as a privacy non-event. One person quipped that “Worrying about a computer reading your email is like worrying about your dog seeing you naked.”

So should we worry about the government running computer algorithms on our call data? I can see two main reasons to object.

posted by Fergie @ 5/30/2006 11:10:00 AM