Medb Ruane: If you thought 'The Truman Show' invaded a man's privacy, it has nothing on the internet
Saturday August 21 2010
Jim Carrey's character was prophetic in The Truman Show 12 years ago. The world was warned when the cynic Christof spoke the chilling truth: "We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented."
If the movie was remade for 2010, they'd have to fix the line. New technologies are forcing us to think twice about reality, whatever that is, especially now, when even Google Chief Eric Schmidt is warning the global online community about the dangers of "over-sharing".
Over-sharing isn't about generosity. It's a splashing of eggs, grit and cascades of indelible embarrassment over Generation Facebook's cheeks. Not only them. Everyone who puts personal information up online loses ownership and control instantly. As Buzz Lightyear might say (if he was a Dub), you're bollixed for infinity and beyond.
Schmidt sent mixed messages when he spoke to The Wall Street Journal, after opining differently the previous week. He told the Journal that people may actually have to change their names in future, so as to avoid being noosed by potentially damaging data they've shared with Twitter, Facebook and Google. The data could hurt their loves, lives and careers.
Change your name? That's like being in a witness-protection programme 'cos the Mob will get you if you're recognised.
Stories began circulating about Stacy Snyder, a woman graduate who was refused a teaching certificate on the grounds that she was "unfit". She had innocently uploaded an image onto a social-networking site, showing her wearing a pirate costume and swigging an unidentified drink, pasted over the caption "drunken pirate".
That was mild. Trawl through some social-networking sites and you might find holiday pics of moments you'd never want your boss/boyfriend/children to see. Or comments slagging off teachers, employers, random rivals that you felt safe typing because you were home alone late at night. Or love stuff written long, long ago to forgotten fancies.
Then there's information about age, gender, family background, employment records, addresses, likes and dislikes or completed psychobabble questionnaires you filled in for fun. Even your browsing history isn't your own. IQ tests, brain-training scores, questions to online pharmacies about blemishes you don't want to share with your doctor.
"I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," Schmidt told the Journal. "I mean we really have to think about these things as a society."
Raising the issues is timely. From cyber bullying to identity theft, online monsters grow faster than we can name them -- or protect ourselves against them. Each of us, everywhere, leaks more data into cyberspace than we imagine. The State interacts routinely with citizens online, so you're out there, somewhere, even if you're a last-century Luddite.
State data is encrypted but codes can be broken and anyways, you'd be naive to think that public servants never indulge the urge to snoop.
"The internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy we've ever had," Schmidt said.
But will he introduce better privacy rules, more warnings, less cookies? Last week, he told a technology conference that anonymity wasn't an option and that one day governments will insist on verified name services online.
Is privacy a thing of the past? The right to a private life must be asserted.
"For God's sake, Chris! The whole world is watching. We can't let him die in front of a live audience!" a stooge had urged Cristof when Truman was struggling to escape.
"He was born in front of a live audience," Ed Harris as Christof coldly replied. Making so much money out of it, why should he care?
So the impossible takes a step closer -- the prospect that each of us is a Truman, or will be soon, born to a potential audience of 1.7 billion. On the air, but unaware.
"And as he grew so did technology," Christof's TV promos said. "An entire human life -- recorded on an intricate network of hidden cameras and broadcasted live and uninterrupted 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to an audience around the globe."
Cyber leaders like Schmidt could be pioneering campaigns to protect privacy, such as giving automatic encryption on all sites, not only social networks, and rights to end users about their own files.
But the research, development and marketing information yielded by browsing histories and such stuff means they have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
Hollow warnings like his are putting all the onus on users, who may be as young as three years old. Instead, they should be adapting their technologies to honour this life-affirming human desire to link up socially and make conversation all over the world.
What do we do meanwhile? Be careful, very careful -- although not to the point of paranoia.
"I know you better than you know yourself," Ed Harris, as Christof, told Truman.
"You never had a camera in my head," Carrey snapped back.
Cyberspace is becoming a virtual 'camera in the head' because the technologies keep moving.
Google's chief executive says it's the first thing humanity built that it doesn't understand? That's like an invitation for someone, anyone, to play God -- or a scary admission that cyberspace is spiralling out of control.
Irish Independent
