Ten years from now, will privacy be the exception? Pew Research asked this and other questions of thousands of privacy and internet experts for a report titled “The Future of Privacy.”
On some core questions, they were divided. Pew asked all of them whether, by 2025, policy makers will have developed an infrastructure for privacy rights that both ensures ease of innovation and simplifies a means for individuals to protect their information. 55 percent said “no,” such an infrastructure would not exist, while 45 percent thought it would.
Pew collected a number of “common thoughts” for the report. Some of the highlights: “People are living in an unprecedented condition of ubiquitous surveillance”; “Living a public life is the new default”; “People require little more inducement than personal convenience to disclose their personal information.”
On the latter point, Bob Briscoe, chief researcher in networking and infrastructure for British Telecom, told Pew, “Lack of concern about privacy stems from complacency because most people’s life experiences teach them that revealing their private information allows commercial (and public) organisations to make their lives easier (by targeting their needs), whereas the detrimental cases tend to be very serious but relatively rare.”
This reflects several recent studies that show that, while people across the world are very concerned about their lack of privacy, few are inclined to do much about it. The lure of efficient and useful apps often trumps the loss of privacy, for the average user.
Several of the experts featured in the report appear to believe that the very concept of privacy as we know it may soon be extinct. Nick Arnett, a business intelligence expert, wrote, “Society’s definitions of ‘privacy’ and ‘freedom’ will have changed so much by 2025 that today’s meanings will no longer apply.”
“By 2025, many of the issues, behaviors, and information we consider to be private today will not be so… Information will be even more pervasive, even more liquid, and portable. The digital private sphere, as well as the digital public sphere, will most likely completely overlap,” speculated Homero Gil de Zuniga, director of the Digital Media Research Program at the University of Texas-Austin.
As for those who cling to their privacy, several respondents imagined them pushed to the “fringe” of society: “You will see a small fringe of technically savvy people who will try to continue to deploy technology to protect some privacy for some purposes, but this will be small and periodically attacked or placed under particularly intense surveillance,” predicted Clifford Lynch, executive director for the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) and Berkeley professor. “You will also continue to see the government try to punish corporations who try to side with their customers, and reward corporations who are helpful to government objectives.”
“I expect that these off-grid people will be treated by authorities worldwide as suspect in some way, simply because they choose not to be tracked,” said Alison Alexander, a journalism professor at the University of Georgia. “That alone, being off-grid, will likely be made a serious crime… The original concept of privacy is dead. The new concept of privacy is: ‘Only the government and my friends know.’”
Pew notes that this is not a “survey,” since it was not random. It only expresses the prevailing opinions of the experts Pew hand-selected.
Read other quotes and perspectives in the full report.
