Computerized shopping, mailing, banking, information and surveillance services in the home are the most massive threat ever to privacy, according to a study to be released today.
The report, commissioned by the Transport and Communications department of the Ontario government, urges companies providing such services to adopt legally-binding privacy codes to protect customers whose homes are, or soon will be, computer-scanned as often as every eight seconds.
Failing quick, voluntary self-regulation by the companies, the report says federal regulators should act to control the use of data automatically flowing from homes into commercial computers.
The report by University of Western Ontario privacy specialist Dr. David Flaherty says nothing more than goodwill now prevents cablevision and phone companies from giving away or selling the information. The list of potential recipients includes the police, credit agencies, salesmen, fundraisers or special interest groups.
As part of his year-long study, Flaherty surveyed public attitudes toward privacy. Most people questioned in 210 households ranked privacy protection as more important than nuclear proliferation, freedom of speech or freedom of the press.
The study concentrated on the impact of new services offered by cablevision companies. Computer- ized security services, which continuously and automatically electronically check “wired” homes for robbers, fire and other emergencies have been introduced in Ottawa and Victoria, and much more elaborate two-way systems are envisioned for the future.
Flaherty says videotex services, such as Telidon, being tested by the government and phone companies are equally threatening. The most sophisticated pilot project is called Grassroots. which will make electronic banking available later this year to 1,500 subscribers, mostly in Western Canada.
Flaherty says the services will transform the current “one-way electronic highway” of phone and television into a two-way street, with information flowing both into and out of homes. “And when that happens, the electronic highway will be easy prey for a modern electronic highwayman.”
Vast amounts of information can be automatically collected by the computers. The computer could compile, for example, lists of everyone who subscribes electronically to information from gay rights groups or political parties.
At Flaherty’s urging, the Canadian Cable Television Association recently formed a committee to draft a 10-point privacy code. That, along with Flaherty’s concerns, will be presented to the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission this fall, at the same time as a number of proposals for two-way electronic services.
- Margaret Munro, Southam News
August 11, 1983
https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=7KMyAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Bu8FAAAAIBAJ&pg=951%2C5010
Could just be the natural course of things.
I mean, that article is way ahead. I think it wasn’t for another 15 years or so until companies started to figure out collecting and selling data about people and using it for targeted advertising was THE best business model for the internet and network-connected devices in general.
And here we are. The internet is now dominated by a handful of big tech companies who do exactly that. And they provide us with nice and free services in exchange. I guess that’s been going on long enough and aligns well with how humans work, so that nowadays nobody questions this anymore. Obviously you would, if that’d be a daunting, new thing with unknown consequences.
But ‘they’ got to us.
Maybe we can compare that to the recent discussions regarding AI? Everyone is speaking of it, how it will steal their job or herald the end / doom. I guess in 10 years nobody questions ChatGPT choosing what recipe they cook for dinner, because it knows exactly what’s in the fridge and knows what you like better than yourself.
I suppose it’s kind of the government’s job to regulate things like privacy and taking advantage of normal people? The EU sometimes does that. But they also randomly mix in ‘we need total surveillance to fight child abuse’, as they tried recently.
I could have seen the article due to my own interests too, and it’s hard to miss a big bit of text that says “threat to privacy” for me.
We can’t predict the future of AI, but caution and care would be useful, and politicians in general are still less literate about today’s technology than the contents of this 40-year-old article. I don’t have a silver bullet solution for how the EU could adopt good regulations and shutter the bad ones, but listening to tech experts would be a good start. (Same with America, but with the added need to keep big tech goons away from politicians.)
Completely agree. Lobbyism isn’t a good thing. And we know who is going to win that battle if the one side rather sells their privacy than pay $5 a month for a service versus a multi billion dollar company that is happy to invest quite some money to get the politicians do what they like.
And I’m not a big fan of just letting capitalism do it’s thing in general. It will probably not end up with a solution that is fair and benefits everyone. In my opinion lawmakers should be more proactive and also learn about the technology they need to regulate. We need some answers anyways. Even the industry struggles with questions like: how does copyright go together with AI.
I also struggle with all the recommendation algorithms and filter bubbles. And I think that’s only getting worse and not healthy to society at all.