Information:
Who wants to know?

by Vincent Dow

"Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance. . . . We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine."

--Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Institutional databases pose a potential threat to a free society - but also bring benefits to large organizations. The rate at which database technology grows has far outpaced research on the subject, and there is scant published material available which probes the implications of this kind of large-scale information gathering/storage/retrieval - many people find themselves dismayed at the extent to which information on themselves has been amassed, bought, and sold. Here, then, I want to map out some of the sites where this technology is deployed in everyday life.

Information as a Form of Control

I once heard that during World War One, the British government introduced wartime legislation forcing all travellers to carry small booklets containing personal information: origin, destination, nationality, etc. Civil libertarians of the day cried foul, recognising a powerful control over the movement of free people. But as with all wars, there was less time and patience, and so the legislation stuck. Today, no one would think of leaving their country of origin without this same booklet - which is, of course, the passport. Historical accuracy is not my point here: rather, it is to illustrate how governmental bodies, simply by their legislative nature, work irresistibly at extending control in new and creative ways.

With the advent of the modern computer to perform data entry and retrieval on magnetic tape, around the end of World War Two, governments became able to disencumber the management of information on a population in excess of 100 million people. What had previously been an elephantine task, requiring an army of bureaucrats to manage, became electro-magnetically simple. Only the entry of already-existing records remained for paper-pushers - all subsequent data was entered into the mainframes.

Governments have always recognised the value of information. The larger and more paternalistic a government becomes, the more they rely on a centralised data system. In the United States, where the population exceeds 250 million, managing the social infrastructure is a relatively sophisticated task: organising social security, census taking, military records, health care, and a thousand other administrative functions - and, of course, taxation to pay for it all. The immensity of such an operation has committed the nation's destiny to digital dependency. There is truly no turning back.

Today's Technology

The computers employed by today's governments afford an unbelievable capacity for data storage and retrieval. It's impossible for me to conjecture about the power of government supercomputers - the work of storing every grain of information on a person's life, from parking tickets to allergies, is reduced to the work of data entry, processing, and retrieval. The question becomes, not what to include, but what to leave out.

The benefit for governments in employing massive databases with instantaneous recall seems quite obvious, and to a great extent these benefits are shared by the many individuals whose extension is the government itself. Medical databases can draw forth a patient's entire medical history at the push of a button, preventing misdiagnoses and other complications that result from ignorance. Law enforcement databses can be employed to detect patterns of serial killers, stalkers, and rapists. Employment and social insurance databanks can sniff out fraudulent unemployment insurance and welfare collections, protecting the system from abuse. Indeed, the benefits seem endless - in part because those extolling them are those arming themselves with them.

For citizens, though, the problems start when two or more of these databases are cross-referenced to produce information on them. Relatively innocuous information, like medical records, becomes threatening in the hands of insurance companies; personal information is not information one would necessarily want on the desk of a Revenue Canada official. And that goes for even the most virtuous of us. There's no point, either, in fearing that government agencies may match files with private sector information brokers like credit bureaus - they've been doing that for a quarter century already: the Associate Credit Bureau of America "proudly boasts", on behalf of its subsidiary bureaus, that FBI agents constantly check its databanks for information in connection with their investigations. . .1

Who Wants To Know About You . . . Besides the Government?

In the world of private finance, reputation and credibility have always been important factors to consider before any transactions are made, even before instant data retrieval entered the picture. In the small village, individual reputation is a direct extension of one's actions, and everyone knows the risks; in the relative anonymity of advanced capitalism, though, the need to keep track of people who do bad business is just part of the system.

Take housing, for example. In Québec, if an individual enters into a lease agreement and fails to honour the terms - say, by leaving without a trace - the landlord has recourse to taking the case to the Régie du logement and other recognized legal channels to obtain the rent2. If that doesn't happen, the renter defaults; her or his name is entered as such into a credit bureau database, with details describing the nature of the default. Forever.

Buy Now, Pay Later

Given the nature of the business of extending credit, it is impossible to expect absolute privacy from one's creditor. After all, you might say, business just can't be done that way - no one in their right mind would lend capital to an unknown party. That may no longer be problem soon, though: most people seem quite willing to compromise their privacy to buy on credit - and even if those who don't are welcome to go on paying their way with cash, it's a safe bet that cash transactions will become more and more inconvenient as time goes on, if not obsolete.

As financial enterprises, of course, credit card companies also fulfill the function of selling consumer information to companies which market through unsolicited mail. One British direct marketing company, for example, offered clients a catalogue with details on 5 000 executive secretaries who, "because of their executive and influential roles . . . have a considerable influence on the activities and buying habits of their bosses."3 And, again, this is nothing new - observe airline companies, who have turned a profit for years by selling passenger information to hotels and rental car companies.

Panopticism

In The Information Game, Geoffrey Brown uses the story of the British murderer Dr. Crippen to illustrate the tricky nature of discussing issues of privacy in relation to technology. Dr. Crippen committed murder in England in 1910 and was on a steamer bound for (of all places) Canada, when British authorities alerted the steamer crew of their unsavoury passenger over wireless radio; he was promptly apprehended by crew members and delivered to law enforcement agents at the next port of call.4 Now, you'd be hard pressed to argue that Dr. Crippen's right to privacy was being infringed upon by a sinister radio; indeed, it would seem a clear case of technology being used an "extension" of humans, to borrow Marshall McLuhan's term. If the automobile (and wheel) is the extension of our legs, the knife an extension of our fingernails, and the radio an extension of our voices, then the credit bureau, one might argue, is the extension of our reputation - our need to know about others. To further illustrate the point one might argue that the database is a repository of truths, provided that its information is accurate - which would be the responsibility of every individual to verify her or himself. As responsible as that sounds, it's not a mode of behaviour most people in our society have time for. But the omniscient database of the future may well reveal some truths that society has put off for too long already.

If enough prominent people were exposed as current or past marijuana smokers by some future databse that could cross-reference school disciplinary files, law enforcement records and medical dossiers, might these people come "out of the closet", so to speak, and show the political will to change existing substance control laws? Apply the same logic to other "social closet" cases, such as bankruptcy victims, or individuals whose sexual gratification can only be achieved through the use of machines. If personal information becomes available on everyone, it would seem the only answer to survival would be to keep one's nose clean: but this scenario might also have the side effect of forcing us to reexamine what we mean by "clean". Call it getting real. . .

I'm being relatively optimistic when I suggest this as a possibility: a society without taboos. The other scenario is that people will try harder to hide embarrassing facts about themselves and point the finger at others to draw away attention. Information becomes a tool of intimidation: anyone could be checking up on you at any time, so you begin to police yourself. The panopticon becomes a reality, but unlike the 19th-century circular building where prisoners would monitor each other's activities, our panopticon will be invisible, unperceived but all around us. The analogy of a frog in a pot of boiling water becomes startingly familiar. These are the issues we as a society face.

2 Phone call, Arnold Bennett's Housing Hotline, Montréal.

3 Geoffrey Brown, The Information Game: Ethical Issues in a Microchip World. (London: Humanities Press International, 1990), p. 87

4 ibid, p. 40