Introspective Ode To Virtual Post-Private Networks
February 18th, 2010
At this point I have become pretty comfortable giving up most of my privacy. In fact, I think I have come to assume that many facets of my physical life will end up being disseminated digitally at some point to varying numbers of other people (whether or not anyone is actually paying attention). As bizarre as this seems to be, it doesn’t quite interest me as much as the personal facts and statistics about me that are constantly being collected in Cookies and databases such as Google and Facebook. The utterly inane details of my life: my school, email contacts, web history, sexuality are being coded along with everyone else into huge IT centers somewhere outside of my physical OR digital visibility.
Does this mean anything in terms of privacy? Clearly there are other humans analyzing this data for large-scale trends, but for the most part this data seems to be merely chewed up and spit out by code in order to target ad material towards me. While I have literally never clicked on a targeted ad, the way that the adsense code reads into my emails and profile information astounds me in a way that I have begun to feel an odd connection with the ads. However vile or offensively inaccurate some of the ads may be, the mirror they hold up to my public and “private” movement online is at least interesting as one would watch one of Golan Levin’s robotic eyeballs watching them. How can technology continue to break down one’s (in my opinion inherently flawed) notion of their “privacy” and reconstitute it in terms of capitalism? How can Adsense more fully learn me until I don’t need to think of it’s artificial intelligence as quaint? Will I ever care about privacy again? Did I care before the internet? I might’ve been too young to care by that point anyway.
While there are still some secrets left in my personal life, somehow I don’t think I’d care if they ended up on the internet….