Internet privacy and security: airstrip one, brave new world or what else?

If security is the carrot that will encourage Americans to exchange their liberty for data profiling, then the corporate sector may illustrate how low a price privacy really is. In a recent analysis of Microsoft XP's Update feature (an automatic routine that allows users to download the latest "patch" for their computer operating system) Mike Hartmann of Tech Channel in Germany demonstrated how the software vendor gains access to hardware information from users, and has the capability to determine software used on individuals' machines. Again, information is power, but in this case particularly valuable marketplace power.

"So what?" some might ask, a little bit of "opt in" data for the software giant, "What does it cost you?". While Microsoft argues that updates are "optional", it must be remembered that these patches are often fixes to the imperfect products offered by the company in the first place, either simple error corrections or adjustments to the security and integrity of the computer. One must question how voluntary these corrections really are.

At the more prosaic level, Internet hoaxes like Freewheelz.com (a website promising a free car in exchange for extensive personal information, including a regular stool sample) illustrated how willing citizens are to hand over information in exchange for large or even very token rewards (many people responded to the hoax). Overall, this reflects either the casual attitude to information of those who fear not the state nor corporate America; or ignorance about the possibilities of the data bank society (the latter being more likely). When Scott McNealy, head of Sun Microsystems, told reporters that "You have zero privacy anyway … Get over it", he was not simply arguing that his vision of an integrated information society was not just right, but appropriate - a normative good for the post-modern age in which we live. This view, however, in combination with the aggressive stance taken by the PATRIOTs into online information, data mining of multiple databases, and the US music industry's desire to take direct action (cracking attacks) against computer users who share MP3 music files online, questions the status of personal privacy as a natural human right.

Developments in data mining in the intelligence community and commercial sector are not - as some would argue - the inevitable march of technological progress making us so much more efficient and effective. This revised view of technological determinism is an easy way to explain the tendency for governments and large corporate actors to erode the privacy of citizens. In reality, what we see is a least-effort lock-in adoption of an insidious character. Insidious, not because it's a type of "rush to the bottom of the barrel" phenomena proclaimed by many privacy groups - but because of a fundamental lack of political imagination. Technology driven (or dependent) western societies are not "locked-in" to the Poindexter-McNealy view of the future because the technology makes privacy and the respect for personal liberty obsolete, but because those who lead have limited political and cultural imaginations and are committed to a narrow economic-rationalist paradigm.

As the Europeans have demonstrated, public interest regulation of corporations can be effective, and the expansion of these regulations globally is required when corporations like Microsoft can extract information from Sydney for data mining in Redmond. When it comes to the aggregation of data by government intelligence services, can you really trust a US administration lead by a man who argues that "There ought to be limits to freedom" when irritated by public criticism?