Balancing Privacy and Advancement

            The Circle was a reminder of a persistent personal concern of mine—one which I have long contemplated and never resolved. My intended career path is likely to bring me face-to-face with a tradeoff between preserving privacy and enhancing various aspects of life, and I place great value in each of those interests. Although I am fascinated by fields such as machine learning and interpretation of human-generated data, I am also well aware of the ramifications of such work: even before reading The Circle, I encountered the same concerns not only in other courses—Dr. Braitberg’s “Exploring Electronic Presence” and “Cultures of Surveillance”—but also from interacting with my own father, who is exceedingly, perhaps even excessively, careful about how he allows his information to be collected and used. How, then, do I decide what information to collect?

            Deciding how to weigh privacy against the benefits of knowledge, while necessary, is not necessarily enough. Two or three years ago, I wrote a Java program to scan a web page, collect data on how often pairs of words are used in conjunction vs. separately, and then follow all links on the page and repeat. The idea was to perform statistical tests in order to determine which words were being used together on a regular basis. Now, this particular type of data collection could only work when applied to a very large amount of material, making it fairly benign to the privacy of the individual—at least on its own. Only afterward did I realize the implications of such data when combined with more personal information: if one knew the types of pages visited by an individual, one could infer a great deal of information about an individual that he or she had never directly shared. For example, if you frequent a particular news website, broad information on the linguistic tendencies of that site could betray your political sentiments and more. Such questionable possibilities stemming from an innocuous concept worry me, particularly when extrapolated to more advanced fields such as natural language processing and neural networks—both of which are interests of mine.

            In addition to presenting the aforementioned privacy tradeoff, this dilemma can be viewed as a conflict between accelerationism and a more Thoreau-like worldview. I, personally, am drawn to these technologies not as much for their utility as for the intellectual pursuits themselves—and for the future advancements they may bring. My perspective as an aspiring software developer is thus markedly accelerationist: advancement for the sake of advancement. On the consumer side, however, things are rather different; I read an article just this morning discussing how only 28% of Windows users make use of Microsoft’s digital assistant, Cortana. While I knew that I didn’t use it, I hadn’t realized how small a percentage of people did. As Thoreau put it, “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” Perhaps, at least for the time being, there is less of a market for AI than developers assume. I doubt that will stop anyone, though. It’s not likely to stop me.

Works Cited

Eggers, Dave. The Circle. New York: Vintage Books, 2013. Print.

Hachman, Mark. “Windows 10's 500 million devices snub Cortana, impacting Microsoft's AI push.” PCWorld. IDG Communications. 10 May 2017. Web. 10 May 2017.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Digital Thoreau. State University of New York at Genesco, The Thoreau Society, and The Walden Woods Project, n.d. Web. 10 May 2017.