The Sum of Our Data
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To The Best Of Our Knowledge
11-23 20:0014
全文概览
The dialogue explores the intricate issues of data ownership, digital privacy, and the fate of digital data posthumously, interlacing personal narratives with historical context and philosophical viewpoints. It begins with a reflection on a 1970s preschool study that collected extensive data on its subjects, inspiring a lifelong exploration into privacy and data by the speaker, who authored "Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment." This leads to a broader examination of society's evolving relationship with data, influenced by technological progress and changing privacy attitudes, highlighting concerns over data commodification by corporations and the permanence of digital footprints. The discussion delves into digital immortality, pondering the ethical implications of deceased individuals' online data persisting and its effects on future generations and historical records. It also contemplates the use of digital avatars and simulations as means of preserving connections with the deceased, raising ethical questions about honoring memory versus potential manipulation or exploitation. Throughout, the dialogue underscores the profound changes digital technologies have introduced to our concepts of privacy, identity, and the afterlife, prompting a reevaluation of how we manage and perceive our digital legacies.
The dialogue explores the intricate issues of data ownership, digital privacy, and the fate of digital data posthumously, interlacing personal narratives with historical context and philosophical viewpoints. It begins with a reflection on a 1970s preschool study that collected extensive data on its subjects, inspiring a lifelong exploration into privacy and data by the speaker, who authored "Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment." This leads to a broader examination of society's evolving relationship with data, influenced by technological progress and changing privacy attitudes, highlighting concerns over data commodification by corporations and the permanence of digital footprints. The discussion delves into digital immortality, pondering the ethical implications of deceased individuals' online data persisting and its effects on future generations and historical records. It also contemplates the use of digital avatars and simulations as means of preserving connections with the deceased, raising ethical questions about honoring memory versus potential manipulation or exploitation. Throughout, the dialogue underscores the profound changes digital technologies have introduced to our concepts of privacy, identity, and the afterlife, prompting a reevaluation of how we manage and perceive our digital legacies.
00:00
00:00
The Value of Data Ownership and Privacy in the Digital Age
The dialogue discusses the implications of having control over one's data and the impact of digital privacy on personal life. It also touches upon the issues surrounding data management upon an individual's death, reflecting on the vast amount of personal information stored in the digital clouds.
00:44
00:44
The Evolution of Data Mining and Personal Information Gathering
The dialogue traces the origins of data mining and the collection of personal data back to the late 60s and 70s with the development of modern databases. It suggests that the practice of using data to predict individual behaviors and preferences may have even started in childhood, hinting at a broader, more pervasive impact of data collection on personal lives.
01:46
01:46
Observational Study and Personal Reflection in a University-Linked Preschool
In 1972, a university operated the Harold E Jones Child Study Center as a laboratory preschool, studying a cohort of 128 children. The design by Joseph Esri featured mirrored classrooms and an observation gallery, enabling researchers to monitor children without being seen, and included one-way mirrors and listening devices for more intimate testing sessions. Susanna Breslin later explored her participation in this psychological experiment, linking her search for personal identity to her experiences as a 'data baby'.
03:45
03:45
Intellectual Parents' Obsession with Advanced Early Education
The speaker describes how their intellectual parents, both English professors, were intrigued by a specialized preschool for gifted children, seeing it as a prestigious choice that elevated their child's potential future status, akin to a social marker of superiority.
04:51
04:51
The Observer Effect and Personal Transformation in a Study
The dialogue reveals how being part of a study led to a significant personal impact, influenced by the expectations and awareness of being observed. The individual found a sense of purpose and caring through the study, which had a profound psychological effect, overshadowing the potential observer effect. This experience reshaped their perception and gave their life a greater meaning.
06:28
06:28
The Influence of Early Observational Studies on a Sex Journalist's Career
The dialogue reflects on a unique childhood study conducted at a Child Study Center, where participants were periodically observed by psychologists using one-way mirrors. This experience, characterized by a child's fascination with the adults' undivided attention, is linked to the individual's later career choice as a sex journalist. The profession, requiring a deep dive into private lives and a voyeuristic approach, is pondered to have roots in the early observational research. The narrator contemplates the potential impact of these early studies on developing a lifelong interest in voyeurism and how it influenced the choice to cover the sex and entertainment industry.
09:17
09:17
A Quest for Self-Knowledge Following a Life-Changing Diagnosis
Inspired by a past study, a woman embarks on a journey to uncover predictions made about her future, prompted by her rare and aggressive breast cancer diagnosis and a challenging period in her life.
11:08
11:08
Finding Self-Identity
The speaker discusses their journey of searching externally for their identity, influenced by perceptions of others, such as family and a past partner, through various roles and experiences. The realization comes that understanding oneself requires telling one's own story, as emphasized by a book, leading to a shift towards self-discovery.
12:22
12:22
Complexities of Self-Discovery and the Impact of a Long-Term Study
Exploring the nuanced journey of self-discovery post a significant life event, the speaker reflects on their ongoing relationship with a study conducted until they were 32. They share how the experience, although beneficial, doesn't lead to a simple or universally expected conclusion about self-acceptance or enlightenment. Instead, it presents a more complicated understanding of personal growth and the continuous nature of self-exploration.
14:32
14:32
The Intrusiveness of Privacy in Historical Studies
The dialogue discusses a study where participants had varied experiences, highlighting one individual's decision to drop out due to feeling too intruded upon. The speaker reflects on privacy concerns, noting that the era of the study predates modern data collection practices. They express skepticism about the notion of privacy, suggesting that in the digital age, little of one's life remains truly private.
16:08
16:08
The Digital Panopticon: Quantifying and Sharing Childhood
The dialogue reflects on the increasing surveillance and documentation of children's lives from before birth, through social media and other digital platforms, raising questions about privacy, consent, and the potential long-term effects on individuals. It speculates on the psychological impact of living in a high-tech panopticon and the eventual self-reflection these individuals might have as adults, considering their entire lives have been publicly documented.
17:33
17:33
The Dilemma of Life's Data: Unraveling the Self
Exploring the emotional quandary faced when considering the impact of accessing every data point from one's life, revealing the distinction between factual data and personal narrative. The fear of discovering a self different from one's perceived identity highlights the complex interplay between data and self-identity.
18:38
18:38
The Evolution of Privacy in the Digital Age
Journalist Susanna Breslin discusses her book 'Data Baby: My Life in the Psychological Experiment' with producer Angelo Battista, exploring the loss of privacy and the importance of safeguarding personal data. As society becomes more interconnected, the dialogue prompts a reflection on whether privacy remains a fundamental right worth protecting, or if it's a relic of the past. The conversation touches on the shift in public perception of privacy in the digital era and the challenges posed by the abundance of information.
19:55
19:55
Surveillance Expansion Post-9/11 and New Law Approval
Following the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, there was a significant increase in surveillance measures and fear, leading to the enactment of a law aimed at surveilling all communications utilized by terrorists.
20:18
20:18
The Shift in Perception of Privacy Following NSA Revelations
A speaker discusses the changing view of privacy, sparked by the Snowden revelations, which exposed extensive NSA surveillance. The dialogue focuses on the fatuous notion that privacy is for those with something to hide, rather than a fundamental right for all. The speaker expresses frustration with the lack of response to this idea and the subsequent erosion of privacy values.
22:13
22:13
The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life
Philosopher Lowry Presley, a Stanford professor, explores the idea that privacy extends beyond safeguarding personal data; it's about self-determination regarding public exposure. He questions the value of reducing one's public presence and the embrace of anonymity for a better life.
22:52
22:52
The Significance of Oblivion in Privacy and Society
The dialogue discusses the concept of oblivion, contrasting it with secrecy and other modes of unknowing. It emphasizes that privacy protects a state of oblivion, where individuals are unaware of certain aspects of their lives, and this unknowing is valuable for personal development and societal structure. The speaker argues that we have lost sight of the distinction between different forms of unknowing and the importance of oblivion in fostering a richer, more private life.
27:07
27:07
Exposure and Invasion of Privacy in the Digital Age
A personal experience highlights the invasion of privacy through targeted advertisements on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, sparking a reflection on the evolution of privacy concerns from the early 19th century to the digital age. The speaker discusses how technological advancements, particularly in information technology, have led to a perceived loss of privacy, as everyday activities and personal information become subject to scrutiny and exploitation. The essence of privacy, according to the speaker, lies in the creation of new pieces of information about individuals where none existed before, leading to a sense of exposure. This experience prompts a broader inquiry into what is being exposed and the nature of privacy itself, touching upon historical and contemporary perspectives on privacy rights and the impact of technology on personal lives.
31:40
31:40
The Inevitability of Losing Privacy
Laurie expresses a pessimistic view about regaining privacy, attributing the loss to the nature of human history and potential future developments. Despite a generally optimistic outlook on humanity and the future, they recognize the permanent loss of privacy as an unavoidable reality.
32:07
32:07
Conceptualizing a Better Digital World and Reclaiming Privacy
This dialogue emphasizes the importance of recognizing our data as personal and not just facts of life, advocating for a better, more just, and open world that embraces diversity. It highlights the need to question the current digital environment's implications on privacy and personal information, referencing a book that explores the right to oblivion and the positive aspects of a life with privacy.
34:30
34:30
The Digital Afterlife: Shifting Perspectives on the Dead in the Age of the Internet
The dialogue discusses how the digital age, particularly the presence of the deceased in digital spaces like social media and personal devices, is reshaping our understanding of death and the deceased. Traditionally, death was hidden from public view during the modern era, but the Internet has made it impossible to ignore the digital remnants of the dead, leading to a new era of confronting the digital afterlife.
36:14
36:14
The Afterlife of Data and Unanswered Queries
The dialogue opens with a child searching for their mother and inquiring about speaking with her, setting an immediate personal context. The speaker transitions into an unexpected discussion about the 'afterlife of data,' suggesting a reflection on the enduring presence and implications of data beyond its original purpose or use. This juxtaposition between a familial search and a philosophical inquiry about data introduces a unique exploration of themes of permanence, loss, and the digital footprint that may outlive human intentions or expectations.
36:39
36:39
The Afterlife of Digital Data: What Happens When We Die
As technology advances, billions of people around the world leave behind vast amounts of digital information. This data, which serves as a digital memory, includes personal details such as health and location data, as well as collective societal data like DNA records. The conversation explores the challenges of managing and inheriting this digital legacy, considering not only the personal but also the societal implications of what happens to our digital remains after death.
40:54
40:54
The Economic and Ethical Implications of Dead Users' Data in the Digital Age
The dialogue discusses the potential for mining data from deceased social media users, noting that current economic incentives are not strong enough to make it profitable. The speaker predicts that in the coming decades, with an increase in users, the incentive to mine dead users' data will grow. The comparison to Ancestry.com's lucrative DNA profiles is made to illustrate the potential value of data, even after the individual's death, leading to concerns about the privacy implications for the living. The speaker warns that without data privacy rights for the deceased, a significant ethical and economic issue will emerge, suggesting a need for future consideration and action.
42:28
42:28
The Dangers and Implications of Corporate Ownership of Collective Digital Memories
The dialogue explores concerns over the potential problems arising from companies owning personal data, with a focus on the implications for historical records and collective events. It highlights the issue of a single entity, like Elon Musk, potentially controlling access to pivotal moments in digital history, such as the Me Too movement, thereby creating a gatekeeping situation that may influence future historians' understanding of these events.
43:41
43:41
The Digital Afterlife: Data Ownership and Grieving in the Era of Tech Monopolies
The discussion centers on the implications of tech giants, particularly those who own social media platforms, having ultimate control over digital memories and historical data. It explores how these entities might influence the narrative of significant movements, like the Me Too initiative, and raises ethical concerns regarding the manipulation of the past for profit. The dialogue also touches on the contentious issue of creating simulations of deceased individuals, questioning their impact on grieving processes and the potential for reinforcing a denial of death.
45:18
45:18
The Modernist Grieving Paradox and Technology-Enabled Eulogy
Exploring the blend of technology and personal loss through the example of Lori Anderson replicating her late husband Lou Reed's chatbot, this dialogue reflects on the evolving norms of mourning in modernity. It challenges the notion that conversations with the deceased via AI are a form of unresolved grief or pathology, proposing a more inclusive view of how people can relate to their dead in a digitally connected world. The discussion advocates for recognizing diverse grieving processes as natural responses to loss, highlighting the dynamic shifts in societal perceptions of death and remembrance over time.
47:33
47:33
Personal Reflections on Digital Legacy and Afterlife
Initially dismissing personal concern over digital immortality and data preservation, the speaker later acknowledges the topic's philosophical depth and political significance.
48:15
48:15
Emotional Realization of Digital Legacy for Future Generations
A person reflects on the impact of digital immortality, initially triggered by a study projecting the number of deceased Facebook users, and later by personal contemplation of their role and future interaction with their children. This realization leads to the idea of creating a virtual avatar not for the children's grief but to ensure they have a tangible memory of their interaction with their parent, emphasizing the personal significance of leaving a digital presence for loved ones.
50:38
50:38
The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information After Death
Carl O'Mara, a professor of political science at Uppsala University, discusses in a podcast with Steve Paulson, from Wisconsin Public Radio, the implications of what happens to one's data and information upon death. They delve into the importance of being aware of data afterlife, addressing issues of privacy, inheritance, and digital legacies.
发言人 100:10
Information about who you are, what you do, who you love, so much data about you, and constantly in the digital clouds. Would owning your data or having more digital privacy make your life better? And what happens to all that data when you die? Today, under the best of our knowledge, the sum of our data.
发言人 200:42
From WPR, it's to the best of our.
发言人 100:48
Knowledge I'm an strange champs somewhere scattered across databases in hundreds of thousands of servers. There are vast reams of information about you, what you like, share, like, who you know, where you go, what you think, what podcasts you listen to, maybe even your DNA. It all adds up to the story of you in data. So this all started in the late 60s and 70s with the invention of the modern database. But this experiment of data mining, of unknown actors collecting information and making predictions about us, well, that, you could argue, had its start at a preschool.
发言人 301:38
I grew up in Berkeley. My father was an English professor at the University of California, Berkeley .
发言人 101:44
journalist Susanna Breslin.
发言人 301:47
The university ran a preschool called the Harold E Jones Child Study Center, which was a laboratory preschool where researchers and students at the university could study children.
发言人 102:04
And .
发言人 302:06
when I became a student there in 1972, when I was 4, I became one of a cohort of 128 kids who were in a study where they were trying to figure out, if you study a child, can you predict who that child will grow up to be?
发言人 302:32
The Child Study Center was designed by a Bay Area architect named Joseph Esri, and it was made for spying on these. So it had these mirror twin classrooms that sat next to each other. And in between them, there was this observation gallery where the researchers could essentially hide and spy on us so they could see us, but we couldn't see them. And they could hear us because there was a kind of transparency that hung between us. And then for one on one testing, they would take us over to this adjacent building. And in those rooms, there were one way mirrors through which they could watch us. And there were also eavesdropping devices so they could listen to what we were saying.
发言人 103:29
In her memoir Data Baby My Life in a psychological experiment, Susanna breslin's search for her data becomes a search for her own story. Here is producer Angelo Bautista.
发言人 503:41
So it sounds like Michelle Foucault would have loved this preschool.
发言人 303:46
totally normal upbringing.
发言人 503:48
Yeah, a panopticon preschool.
发言人 303:51
exactly.
发言人 503:52
Tell me about your parents, what kind of parent turns their kid into a kind of guinea pig for these scientists?
发言人 304:00
Well, my parents were first and foremost intellectuals. Like I said, my dad was an English professor at Cal, and my mother was an English professor at a smaller college in the East Bay. And so they really were interested in the life of the mind. I think they saw themselves as sophisticated, educated people who were in one way or another, gifted or special. So the idea that there was a special pre-school for special kids who would be in this special study was fascinating to them. And I think it, to some degree, served as a kind of status symbol. If you got your kid enrolled at the child study center, you know, you were the child equivalent of having like a BMW or something, a little elevated marker of who your kid might grow up to be.
发言人 504:52
Yeah, I was wondering if the researchers ever considered whether or not you, knowing that you would be part of the study, would affect the study at all. Kind of like an observer effect?
发言人 305:03
Exactly, yeah. In the mind of the researcher, want create space where there's a minimum observer effect as possible because that's how they get, you know, the best data that they can get. But the reality, I think, is that it was as the observer effect dictates.
发言人 305:23
It was impossible, certainly in my situation, for me not to be affected by the fact that I was being studied. My parents were distant, especially my mother was a very sort of cool person who was not particularly interested in being a mother at a certain point. And so the study took on a kind of larger than life aspect in my psyche. I've, in a way, described it as the mother that I wanted that was always interested in me or always sort of there for me, even when I wasn't actually specifically being studied. It was a kind of shadow in my mind of giving me this sense that my life was meaningful. I had a purpose. I was part of something that was bigger than myself.
发言人 506:20
So in a way, the block study, the study that you were in became sort of this not necessarily parental figure, but someone that cared about you.
发言人 306:29
Yeah, so it was really unique to be studied. We were studying initially at the Child study Center when we were in preschool, but after that, we all went to different school schools and grew up and moved to different places, but we would return for these assessments to Tolman Hall, which was where the psychology department was on the university campus. And we would be assessed in these testing rooms that had ones way mirrors, and it would be you and a researcher in this room. And in a way, it was like a child's dream, which is here's an adult who's giving you its undivided attention, and the entire focus is you they wanted to know all about us, what our personality was like, what we liked, what we didn't like, what was our relationship like with our parents, with our siblings? Had our parents gotten divorced, or were they still married? Who did we want to be? Who did we think we might imagine being our romantic partner when we grew up and that felt like so I really liked being studied.
发言人 507:38
So I kind of want to fast forward a little bit past your childhood. So you grew up to become a journalist and specifically a journalist covering sex and sex entertainment industry. And when I was reading that in the book, I thought I can't imagine you or the researchers studying you would have ever concluded that path for you. Why did you become a sex journalist?
发言人 308:06
I don't know if I have a simple answer to that question. So I think in part, the study did shape my becoming a journalist in general. You could describe a researcher studying me in a way as being journalistic, they're closely studying their subject, they're creating a personality profile, and they're telling a story of a life or a person.
发言人 308:34
As I wrote the book, I did wonder why I became a sex journalist, and I like, is there any way this has anything to do with being in this study? And the one common thread that I saw was that both things are heavily voyeuristic, there's this sort of peeking through these one way mirrors and being spied on and poking into and peering into the most intimate aspects of somebody's life. And the porn industry is what I've written the most about. And that is nothing but voyeurism. Maybe the study turned me into voyeur, but or maybe I was always gon na be one. It's hard to know the difference.
发言人 509:17
it is hard to know, and you kind of went on a quest to figure out what this study had done. So what compelled you to write about the study years later? What was going on in your life?
发言人 309:31
In late 2011, I got married to a man I had met on a dating app and had known for nine days. We eloped in vain guess, and four days after that I found out I had breast cancer during the course of a annual mammogram. So those were two things that happened that changed my life radically. And I had a type of breast cancer that was more rare and aggressive, and I noticed that that made me of a lot of interest to the oncologist.
发言人 310:07
One of the oncologists came in and said, hey, I have all these interns with me. Can we come in, And they sort of gathered around me and we talking about me and my case. And I was like, God, this is like being studied again. This is like being a lab rat again. And I think that brought back the study in my mind.
发言人 310:25
I moved with my then husband to Florida and my writing career was floundering. And I was just like, this was not how I thought my life would end up. I thought my life would be interesting.
发言人 310:39
Is this why I was supposed to be, you know, the sort of existential crisis? And I thought, well, I wonder who the blocks thought I was going to grow up to be? And I thought there must be a file. The study must have kept all this data on me. I wonder what it would tell me about me. And so that sort of piloted me as a journalist to go on this quest that would take me all the way back to Berkeley, where everything had started, and attempt to figure out who they thought I would grow up to be.
发言人 511:08
And did you think they would just, you know, you would show up to Berkeley, they would just hand you your file and everything would make sense?
发言人 311:16
You know, I think of myself as kind of cynical, but I think I'm actually also sort of strangely optimistic. And I think I really thought there will be this file. I'll just open it and it'll just tell me everything about who I am and everything will kind of make sense. That's not quite what happened. That was part of a pattern in my life where I was always looking outside of myself for something or someone else to tell me who I was wanting my parents to see me as this bright child, wanting to study, to see me as exceptional, wanting my then husband to see me as a good wife, being a journalist, and wanting people to think, oh, I was so, you know, badass because I would go hang around the porn industry or whatever. And so it was just like one more way I was trying to find my story outside of myself and this book really sort of forced me to tell my story for myself.
发言人 512:22
So as you were digging, what were you able to find? What did you uncover about the study, about yourself?
发言人 312:30
I didn't get the answer that I thought I wanted, but all kinds of other things happened. I left my marriage, I moved back to Berkeley for a period of time to really immerse myself into that place that I had come from. And I think I have found that I have I, this is I'm sorry, this is the question I can not answer. I feel like this is like the. I struggle to answer that. I feel like this is like the money shot answer that I'm supposed to like.
发言人 313:10
I have a lot of trouble with memoirs, and I feel like people only value memoirs that deliver happy endings. And the promise of a memoir is that in the end, the main character discovers who she really is and accepts herself for who she really is and loves herself and maybe goes like, marries herself at Burning Man or whatever. And I feel like reality is more complicated. And I feel when I do these interviews that I'm supposed to say at the end of my journey, I discovered who I really was. And now I'm like enlightened and unburdened. It feels more complicated than that.
发言人 313:59
I think that's one of the things that I take away from. It is that the study was in many ways very beneficial to my life and saved me in some ways. And I know that I'm not the only one who is in that study that feels that way about the study. So I'm very appreciative for it. And it's sort of funny how the study ended when we were 32, but here I am 20 plus years after that. And in a way, I still involved in the study, like I can't let go of it.
发言人 514:34
Thank you for your honesty and your candor in that answer. You said you were in contact with other participants in the study, what was their experience?
发言人 314:43
Well, everyone who was in the study had their own unique experience. One guy I talked to, he dropped out of the study in his early adolescence. I think it felt too intrusive for him. Another guy who was in the study felt like it had really just changed the course of his life that they had, in fact, intervened in some ways in his life that had really helped him move in a new direction.
发言人 515:13
You mentioned that the guy that dropped out felt that it was too intrusive. You talk a lot about privacy in this. This was a study done long before this era of data collecting and data mining that we have today. Did that ever come up for you, thinking about your private life, whether or not this was really invasive or crossed the line in any way?
发言人 315:36
I thought a lot about privacy while working on the book, and I definitely felt like from the get go, privacy is something I think is just this antiquated notion. I have a kind of eye rolling response to. It no longer exists when people talk about protecting their privacy. I'm a little bit like, do you, are you aware that like everyone just has their hands, your data? At this point? I don't believe that any part of my life is private.
发言人 316:09
To return to where we started, your brain is now the panopticon, or we're all living in this mass high tech panopticon. We are aware that we are being surveyed, but we don't quite seem to want to think about the consequences of that. I think that my experience being in this study was sort of a canary in the coal mine version of what's happening now, where kids lives are being quantified and shared from even before they're born, when their mother posts an ultrasound online and what effect that will have on them as adults, because we don't know yet. It is like another great experiment. I was heavily impacted by being surveyed in this way. Children are not stupid. They know that they're being observed, that their lives are being shared at a certain point. And I'm very interested to see what those kids are going to say about their lives and what memoirs they'll write when they become adults and start sharing what it was like to have the whole world watch them grow up online.
发言人 517:23
Maybe this is not a useful thought experiment, but I was wondering if you did have access to every data point in your life, what would you do with it?
发言人 317:33
If I had access to every data point in my life up to this point.
发言人 517:37
yeah, basically would you want that, would you do with something with that?
发言人 317:40
That's such a great question. I mean, one thing I learned during the process of researching this was there's data and then there's the story that you draw from it. I thought originally I was looking for my data, but I was really looking for my story, so I think if I was presented with the mass of data connected to my life, I would just feel like I am not the sum total of a set of data points. What story can I draw from this data, which is already skewing things because now it's becoming a subjective process would be attractive, but also frightening because what if the sum total of the data of my life tells me that I am someone other than who I think I am or who I want to be? It's a bit of a Pandora's box, right?
发言人 618:36
It?
发言人 318:36
I don't know if I would want to open it.
发言人 118:44
Journalist Susanna Breslin. Her book is called Data Baby My Life in the Psychological Experiment. And that was producer Angelo Battista talking with her.
发言人 118:59
So is hyper connected as we are today? Is privacy really a thing of the past, as Susanna says, or is it still a fundamental right worth protecting? Coming up next, in a sea of information, how to embrace privacy and even oblivion. I'm an strange champs, and this is to the best of our knowledge, from Wisconsin Public Radio. And prx?
发言人 119:35
Do you care about your privacy enough to read through those long privacy policies before hitting the accept button? Well, don't worry, you're not the only one who's gotten careless. As we've moved ever deeper into the digital age, our collective view of privacy has shifted. How did that happen all USA Re?
发言人 419:59
Of 2001? In the wake of September 11 terrorist attacks, we had this explosion of surveillance and also a lot of fear that seemed to justify this new law that I signed today will allow surveillance of all .
发言人 620:15
communications used by terrorists.
发言人 420:18
emails, the Internet and cell phones.
发言人 420:27
But it wasn't just tracking online activity or CCTV cameras or spies or whatever during the surveillance. There's also a kind of propaganda or ideology that came out. And that's the idea that privacy is for. Have something.
发言人 320:45
To.
发言人 420:52
And my thought was no hidings for those who have something to hides, for privacy, for something else. At the time, I didn't know what privacy it was for. It was hard for me to articulate, but the slogan just seemed so fatuous, and it made me crazy that no one responded to that. I just wanted somebody to stand up in the halls of Congress or somewhere and just say, no. Hiding is for those who have something to hide, not privacy.
发言人 421:22
Right around the time of the Snowden disclosures about the massive program of NFA wiretapping, I had an interview on NPR with the journalist who broke the story. Wayne Green, thanks very much. Thank you for having me, appreciate it. The interviewer asked, well, do you have any evidence that any of these people were harmed? Accidentally harmed by the national security? You know, did anything bad really happen here? Someone whose life was destroyed, for example, by information getting into the hands of that agency? My hair stood up. Well, that's one question too many. I had the feeling that we had changed our view of what privacy means, what its value is. We've forgotten why we cared about privacy.
发言人 122:17
Lowry Presley is a philosopher and political theorist who teaches at Stanford. He argues that privacy is not just a fundamental right, but a tool for living our best possible lives. Because in his view, privacy isn't only about protecting personal data, it's about choosing how much of it we even want to generate in the first place. How do we become less known? What would it mean to embrace oblivion? These are questions he poses in his book The Right to Oblivion privacy and the Good Life. Here's producer Charles Monroe Cain.
发言人 722:54
you use a word, it's in the title of your book actually, and I'd like to dig at this word for a second because it's Oblivion, your book is called the Right to Oblivion, not the right to privacy. So Oblivion, what is that?
发言人 423:10
Oblivion is one way that things can not be known, and it's a type of unknowing in the same way that the corresponding way of not knowing something we would say is obliviousness and the reason if I can back up a second, the reason for using oblivion, which is basically what I say privacy protects and producers in society, is that I think we've lost sight of the fact that different modes of concealment, different ways a thing can be unknown, are meaningfully different. They create a different kind of society. Things can be secret, hidden, private, anonymous, mysterious, or so on, and we can also be in relation to those things. We can be confused or suspicious, oblivious, like I said, obtuse, forgetful. And so these different ways of not knowing a thing are different ways we value, have significant implications, and how our society structured and what kind of selves we have.
发言人 424:09
Thinking back to that point about the human rights, so let me let me give you an example and to sort of foreground this example, what we think about privacy when we're thinking about privacy in the digital age as the control of information, preventing information from getting for certain people or whatever, like we're thinking with the privacy settings on Facebook or Instagram, really what we're thinking of is secrecy. Secrets are for protecting information. Confidentiality describes norms of where that information should properly go. Privacy, we might want to assume, describes something else.
发言人 424:42
So to say what oblivion is, let's say we have a friend think about the difference between talking about his private life and his secret life. So we say about his private life, it's hard to say what we're talking about, what object there is, because we don't know. By contrast, if we say his secret life and there's something discreet there, there's something he's hiding, maybe it's a secret family or an affair or some weird hobbies he wants to hide from us or whatever. But if it turns out he doesn't have a secret, if it turns out they're no weird hobbies or a secret second family, then actually he doesn't have a secret life. The secret life vanishes. But you can't say the same thing about his private life. There's no counterfactual about our friend we can say that would make his private life evaporate.
发言人 425:28
And that's because what privacy protects isn't some kind of information that's hidden from other people. And I think this is just what we generally think, but it protects a kind of unknowing where we don't know what we don't know. And we're not suspicious of it either. And I call that oblivion to distinguish it from the other forms of unknowing for a couple reasons.
发言人 425:51
One is that just drawing from the root and oldest meaning of the term oblivion is what's forgotten, and it's not something that's forgotten, and for a minute it can come back to it like what's lost to memory. It's used in other aspects, you know, sleep or death, things that are gone beyond the powers of human perception and knowledge to get at them. It also corresponds to this sense of obliviousness, which we more easily use, and the oblivious person doesn't know what he doesn't know, so that's what you want when we want privacy, we don't want people snooping at our closed drapes or listening at our windows or wondering what on our laptop when they can't see it. What we want is them to be oblivious to that part of our lives that we keep private, so the point of using oblivion is on the one hand to draw out the difference of what privacy protects in society and the difference, secrecy or data controller, these kind of things, because they're different. And in our practices way we live privacy, it shows that they're different. I just think we've forgotten it. And then on the second hand, I think they're actually some goods to oblivion. I think oblivion is a good thing and lends our life depth and all kinds of opportunities for flourishing that we'd be worse off without.
发言人 727:08
You know, I had an experience, oh, about a year ago, I decided to grow up my beard. So I have this big old beard. And eventually you're like, oh, I need some beard products because my face is itchy and I do a bunch of research and like, okay, the only place I want to get these beard products are on Amazon. I don't use Amazon very much, but I'm on my laptop, and I order a brush and a comb and a couple beard products from a couple different companies. So go to Facebook, like seconds later Instagram as well, and I'm inundated with ads that are manly, right? Yeah, like 1 ad was for an axe, other beard products, but also like manly stuff. Stuff that like men living in the outback would have, you know, whatever.
发言人 727:52
It really bothered me, I have to admit now, Now am I aware of how algorithm works and how Instagram and Facebook? And of course I am? I'm even aware that they take information about you and for ads, I felt so exposed. Not only did I feel exposed and upset, which surprised me, I also felt I had no recourse. What about those words? What about feeling exposed, and more importantly, what about the recourse part? I feel like I had no control over my privacy and I was deeply upset. What do you do with that?
发言人 428:27
I have I have the same feeling. And it's interesting that that feeling and that way of describing it, exposure, but also invasion or violation, goes back to the very earliest days of thinking about the value of privacy that emerged in the 19th century in reaction to really the snapshot camera and the development of newspapers, the first mass media, but also a big sprawling public record that information is entered into. And ever since maybe the last third of the 19th century, people have been complaining in privacy's name about different types of developments, technological developments, information technology developments that they felt exposed their lives or violated their privacy in some way. And the interesting thing is okay, you might think taking pictures through someone's bedroom window exposes them or getting the information off their laptop. But the majority of the developments that people complained about as being exposing in this bad way concerned public activity or information we give out freely.
发言人 429:37
In a sense, you bought the beard products in public, you know, on Amazon, at least it wasn't secret, right? And so from all sorts of things. So like getting your picture taken in public, the census development of drivers licenses, databases in the 1970s was a big one. All kinds of things along these lines, and raises a big question, in what sense are you being exposed? So one way of getting to that question is asking, well, what's shared in all of those cases? It's not that something goes from hidden behind a barrier to seen out in the world. It's not that it goes from secret to known, even from like the private of the house to the public of the street. What happens in all of those cases is that a piece of information about you is created where there wasn't one before, and that feels exposing in some way.
发言人 430:28
But the next question is, well, what is being exposed? What's being violated? What's being invaded? In this case, just a piece of information is being created. And those 19th century thinkers that we've sort of got, or I guess commentators, they weren't professional thinkers, they were citizens writing in newspapers.
发言人 430:44
I had an idea that something was lost when the sort of flux of everyday life of living memory and so on. You know, we forget, we don't remember exactly. Our memory is mutable in normal interactions, attains the fixity of information, and especially when somebody else does it for you.
发言人 431:03
Yeah, so, you know, in your case, to use that example in the pre Amazon on days, you might have gone to a store, you know, a men's product store and got a comb and beard lather or whatever. The clerk would try to remember your name. They would know you. There might be a record of the transaction in the form of a receipt, but that would be it. And maybe he would forget you, maybe he would remember your name, maybe he would remember you as somebody who bought a thousand times more beard products than you did. But it was fluid in a way that information isn't. I think our intuition is still the same as it has been since sort of beginning, that something's lost when we turn to information.
发言人 731:40
Laurie I'm really not a cynical person, so I'm about to ask a cynical question, but I'm really not, and I have a rosy view, I think of the future and of humanity. But look, we don't have privacy and we're not going to get it back.
发言人 431:52
right? I mean, I wouldn't say that's cynical so much as, you know, defeatist. Sorry. I think the truth is, and this is probably the truth at all points in human life that it could always get worse.
发言人 732:06
Thanks, man, that's great.
发言人 432:07
thanks. I'm not either. You're a realist. This is the beginning of a statement of optimism, okay? It could always get worse. So that gives us reason always to fight for a better world, a better world which is more just, more open to the flourishing of wide plurality of different ways of being human. And you see movements for that in all sorts of areas of life today. And I think privacy is one of them.
发言人 432:37
I just think, you know, the digital world is so young. The world we're complaining about, about the bank string, about Instagram. You know, you and I were born not that long ago in a world where none of that existed. And so we've just, we were kind of bowled over by it, by its novelty. We also believed that sloganeering of the people who stood to become billionaires from it, that it was going to connect the world and make the world a better place and bring peace and meaningfulness rather than war and genocide and alienation. We bought it for a little while. So that slowed us down. I think those scales have fallen from our eyes to a large extent.
发言人 433:17
And I think the last thing that is really stands in our way of at least of conceptualizing a better world, conceptualizing a solution to the problem, one step towards remedying the problem is just being able to see it for what it is. And that requires new ways of looking at them or new ways that could also be old ways we have lessons. And jewels to rescue from the past.
发言人 433:40
I think one way that we can start to imagine it getting better, to stop thinking that information is just this naturally occurring fact in our lives. In fact, it's something that's being done to us and it's being done to us for someone else's profit. So if we can stop taking for granted fact that we are our data, that we are information, then we've raised a whole series of new moral and political problems at an earlier stage to the questions that we're asking now. So asking the right questions isn't halfway there, but you can't get there if you don't ask the right questions.
发言人 134:23
Lowry Presley is a writer and lecturer at Stanford University. His book is called The Right to Oblivion Privacy and the Good Life.
发言人 134:36
Up next, when you die, you can't take your data with you.
发言人 634:51
It's changing fundamentally how we think about the dead, how we relate to the dead, and really what it means to be a dead person.
发言人 135:02
Carl Oman is a professor of political science at Uppsala University in Sweden.
发言人 635:13
You can say that their relationship to the dead that we're exiting right now is modernity. And modernity by death scholars is referred to us. The era of forbidden death, where the dead are to be hidden from public view. We move cemeteries from the middle of the city to the outskirts of the city. But what's happening now with the Internet is that the dead all of a sudden are all around us.
发言人 635:46
They're in our pockets, literally in our photo libraries, in our smartphones. They're emerging on social media. Fill. So the era of modernity where we tried to hide the dead, that is over. And we are now confronted with the question, what do we do with all these digital remains that surround us?
发言人 336:14
Where's mom? Can I talk to her?
发言人 136:26
Coming up next, a glimpse into the afterlife of data. I'm an strange champs, and this is to the best of our knowledge, from Wisconsin Public Radio. And prx?
发言人 136:45
There are approximately 1.4 billion iPhone users worldwide, over 3 billion Facebook users, and in the next few decades, many of them will die, leaving behind years of text threads with loved ones, precious photos and videos stored on phones and cloud servers. The data that is our memory. So what happens to all of it? Steve Paulson sat down with Carla Oman, author of The Afterlife of Data. What happens to your information when you die and why you should.
发言人 237:20
The obvious thing that I see is if I go on Facebook, and's a Facebook has that to be on and a.t. that is birthday comes up, even though I know they're not around anymore. But can you give me some other examples of these digital remains?
发言人 637:36
Well, what comes to mind when most people hear about this topic is, oh, so like what you do with your Facebook data? Or what's gon na happen to my tweets or my Instagram feed? And sure, like these are all very significant forms of digital remains, but there are all kinds of data that you're generating without even knowing it.
发言人 637:57
If you have an iPhone, you probably have the Apple Health app installed, which comes with every iPhone. That app tracks every step that you're taking. So somewhere on a server, there's a pretty accurate picture of how fit you've been across the years. Every time you move and change places, your phone's going to register that, So your geodata is also constantly logged everywhere.
发言人 638:24
And even more so when it comes to biological data. I personally am a diabetic, and so I have all my blood glucose data on a very detailed basis in an app on my phone, and all that data is on a server somewhere owned by a company, and a lot of people put their DNA in the hands of companies. I think ancestry dot com has 26 million people's DNA. Yeah, and we ought to remember that's not just information about those 26 million, but virtually about everyone in their biological surroundings, their parents, their children, their siblings, and so on and so on. So this is our digital footprint, not just the stuff that you can see, that you immediately think of, but basically everything you do.
发言人 239:13
So there's all this, you know, reams and the reams of data. I guess the question is then, what happens after we die? What happens to that data?
发言人 639:21
I find it a very interesting question, and it can be practically challenging for a person to find, just like, where is all the data Who owns it? If someone has a Gmail account, can I access those emails, playlists, avatars, and video games? There may be heaps of data that you don't even know about, but it also has this really interesting, I think, collective angle. It's not only a question of who owns and controls your personal digital remains, but it's rather also a question about who owns our digital remains, our collective remains as a society and a culture.
发言人 240:04
On one level, I kind of think, who cares if I have all this health data, for instance, on my phone, I die. That seems irrelevant to anyone once I'm gone. So it seems like, okay, there was all this incredibly detailed information about me, but who would care anymore? You are taking this to an entirely different level when you say there's also a collective question about all of this.
发言人 640:30
Yeah, and for the record, like I think the personal level is quite important to bear in mind that all of this data can be used to draw a lot of inferences about, for instance, your children. When you're gone, your data is not only about you, it's also about all of your descendants and can be used to draw inferences about them, to manipulate them, and so on and so on.
发言人 240:54
Is that mining data? Other family members who are not directly part of this data set .
发言人 641:06
is not, to my knowledge, happening right now. But that is probably because it's not lucrative enough thus far. Because when you look at it, maybe like 100 million social media users have died, give or take. But in the next few decades, we're going to look at several hundred million users on Facebook, potentially billions of dead users. And this is a 1, 2, or three decade horizon. Sooner or later, these incentives are going to emerge.
发言人 641:36
And it's a very much like an economic reality. I mentioned ancestry dot com and there are 26 million DNA profiles. Yes, that's lucrative now because people keep paying for the services. But imagine if Ancestry were gon na, let's say, go bankrupt. Okay, what happens then, right? Well, same thing that happens in every bankruptcy. An administrator comes in and sells off, auctions out all the valuable assets. What are the valuable assets in this case?
发言人 642:07
Well, data, of course, we're setting ourselves up to a trap and thinking that the data of the dead is unrelated to the privacy of the living. This is very much connected. And in the next few years, I think we're going to regret overlooking this issue a lot. The dead have no data privacy rights whatsoever.
发言人 242:28
So what are the potential problems down the road then if the companies do own this data and actually are in the position of selling the data?
发言人 642:38
So one of the problems, of course, would be that you can be hacked by proxy from your deceased relatives. But what I think is actually more important is the collective level. Take this hypothetical example, or not even hypothetical example, like very real example of the Me Too campaign. So the Me Too movement was a huge event in 21st century feminism. And future historians, of course, are going to want to study what happened, what were these testimonies about, who spoke out, what were their reactions? Now, one person owns the entirety of these testimonies on a global level, and that person is Elon Musk. So when future historians want to understand our collective digital past, they're going to have to go through one person who's the gatekeeper of all these collectively assembled events and movements.
发言人 243:38
Okay, how, how does Elon Musk own all of this?
发言人 643:41
Because he owns the tweets.
发言人 243:43
okay?
发言人 643:43
He is the sole owner of twiford now X, so he's going to be the person who controls, okay, who can gain access to the data sets, and that's the position that we're in as a society that the Musks and the Zuckerberg and they're not only controlled our present communication infrastructure, they're also the future monopolists of our collective past.
发言人 244:09
So you're saying that when future to take your example of the Me Too movement, those companies potentially can shape how history is being written .
发言人 644:17
exactly?
发言人 244:18
I want to explore this idea of whether our ideas of death and the dead are actually changing because of all of this. Now you're talking about what happens to the data after people are gone. There are also all of these efforts to create lifelike simulations of people who have died, our loved ones, to actually interact with those people. And it raises all kinds of questions about how do we grieve, Does this help us grieve? Or is it the opposite? Because in a way, maybe we're trying to act as if our loved ones have not actually died, that they're still with us.
发言人 644:56
There is certainly this element of death denial in the emergence of these bots impersonating the dead. And there have been voices raised that this is changing grieving practices for the worse in that we can never reach closer in, that the dead is always there for us.
发言人 245:18
To take one example, I mean, I came across a story of Lori Anderson, the performance artist, who has made a chatbot of her late husband, the musician Lou Reed, who died in 2013. Apparently in this chatbot, she's feeding in his writings, his songs, his interviews, so she can actually carry on a conversation writing songs with him in a way, and know she said that most of what comes out of this is really pretty stupid, but about 15% is really interesting and she has become obsessed with this.
发言人 645:51
Yeah, it may sound very high tech and difficult, but anyone can basically do this with ChatGPT. You can just take a conversation log that you have with someone, a couple of thousands of messages back and forth, upload that document, and it's going to replicate. That person is really not that inaccessible.
发言人 246:11
I have a couple of reactions to the Laurie Anderson example. I mean, if she wants to do this and she finds it comforting or nourishing in some way, all power to her, you know, why not? But it also seems like maybe she's trying to hang on to her dead husband when she should just be letting him go.
发言人 646:29
Yeah, I mean, I would push back slightly on that type of reaction because it is very much a kind of modernist way of approaching what grieving should be. I mentioned before that in modernity, the presence of the dead is seen as illegitimate. You know, if someone dies, yes, you can grieve for a certain period, but then you should let go. You should get back to normal, as if normal is the absence of death and the absence of the presence of the dead. And keeping a dialogue with the dead online is therefore seen as some kind of pathological inability to let go or find closure. But I don't think that's a helpful approach because there are many ways of grieving what what is considered a normal relationship to the dead that is certainly not historically or culturally fixed, but will change over the next hundred years as it has changed fundamentally over the past 100 or 150 years.
发言人 247:33
Yeah, Carl, do any of these questions hit home for you personally? You know, if you have dead relatives or loved ones who might want to live on in some digital fashion or you want to have some connection to them or you worry about your own data living on past you, I mean, just how personal does all of this got for you?
发言人 647:55
It's an interesting question. I've gotten it a few times over the years. For the first couple of years, my answer would just be no, this is a philosophical, philosophically stimulating topic. I think the political stakes are very high, but I'm not that concerned on a personal level.
发言人 648:16
The first time that begun to change was in 2019, when a colleague and I published a study where we projected the number of dead Facebook users over the course of the 21st century. And I remember parsing through the data, and I got to Sweden in the 1980s mails, and it suddenly hit me that one of these data points is me, right? I'm one of these. I'm one of these death. And I was like, oh, wow, this actually has to do with me. It's not just this bird eye political collective matter. I'm in here.
发言人 648:59
And the second epiphany that I had on like an emotional level was, when I had my, my kids and I realized, so my oldest is three by now, which is like, right about when you have your first permanent memories that are going to last for the rest of your life. But I realized that if I die now, like if I walk out and I'm hit by a car, my kids are probably not gon na, have one single tangible memory of me throughout the rest of their life, be told stories about me, but they're not going to have any first person memory of what it was like interacting with me. That was the first time I thought, hang on, maybe I should go on and use one of these apps to create a virtual avatar of myself, not because my kids are gon na, use it to grieve or anything like that, but I would have them to know what it was like having a conversation with their dad and maybe not so much for their sake, but rather for my sake of just knowing that they would have known and that that was the second time it it really emotionally hit me that this really has something to do with me.
发言人 250:22
Yeah, and that's a that's a really strong argument for the value of of living on digitally for your children. It will change their memories. It'll change their relationship with you after your God.
发言人 650:36
Yeah, very much so .
发言人 250:39
fascinating. This is a really interesting conversation. Thank you so much.
发言人 650:45
thank you.
发言人 150:54
Carl Oman is a professor of political science at Uppsala University in Sweden, and he's the author of The Afterlife of Data.
发言人 151:01
What happens to your information when you die and why you should care? And that was Steve Paulson talking with him, to the best of our knowledge, comes to you from Madison, Wisconsin, and the studios of Wisconsin Public Radio. Our producers are Angela Bautista, Shannon Henry, kleber Charles Monroe Cain, and our technical director is Joe hartke will help from Sarah Hopeful. Additional music this week comes from Alda Skn Knight and Iliac, the executive producer to the best of our knowledge is Steve Paulson and I'm Ann Strange Champs. Thanks for listening and join us again next time.
Every click on your computer, every swipe on your smartphone, leaves a data trail. Information about who you are, what you do, who you love, the state of your mind and body… so much data about you, expanding day by day in the digital clouds. The question is—do you care? Would owning your data, or having more digital privacy, make life better? And what happens to all that data when you die?
Original Air Date: November 22, 2024
Interviews In This Hour:
A former child test subject seeks the data that shaped her life — In an age of surveillance, do you still care about your privacy? — When you die, what will happen to your data?
Guests:
Susannah Breslin, Lowry Pressly, Carl Öhman
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