Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [71]
I am not dogmatic about absolutely continuous recording. I think we will sometimes shut off the recording and say things off the record. We may even occasionally stop recording just to have the “novelty” of memories that exist only in our heads. Even so, if people only logged a tenth of their lives, the changes in society would still be dramatic. And even a tenth of a life logged would be enormous and significant—how I wish I had a tenth of my grandfather’s life. Once we get a taste of a tenth we will want much more.
ADAPTING IN COURT
Could your e-memories be forced to testify against you? Richard Nixon tried the route of plausible deniability, saying, “You can say ‘I can’t recall . . . ,’ ” but tape recordings of his conversations demolished his denials.
Today in the USA, you can be compelled to produce a diary as part of discovery in a court case. If e-memories are considered a digital diary, they would surely be treated the same way. However, a recent court case ruled against the state’s being able to compel a man to divulge an encryption key for his hard drive, explaining that it would violate his right against self-incrimination. As the case wound through the courts, one judge opined, “Electronic storage devices function as an extension of our own memory. . . . They are capable of storing our thoughts, ranging from the most whimsical to the most profound.” This case gives us a glimpse of hope that the law may eventually come to protect our digital memories. Falling a little short of this, some lawyers are arguing that searching one’s hard drive should be considered especially invasive, more akin to having your body searched than having your papers searched, and thus requiring a higher standard of justification.
I believe that some sensitive information will be stored in a “Swiss data bank,” an actual offshore, encrypted, secret account, which you can plausibly deny the existence of. It may take having several such accounts, so that if evidence was unearthed indicating that you had one, you could turn over the least sensitive. Furthermore, just as secret agents sometimes use a code phrase to indicate they have been compromised, there may be an optional password to the Swiss data bank—intended to be handed over to the authorities—that digitally shreds or somehow hides away some key pieces. It could also function to add all kinds of erroneous data throughout the store, putting the veracity of any of it in doubt.
My advice on hiding information is amoral; it can be used for both good and bad. I’m not aiming to help the next Nixon or pedophile (the court case regarding the encryption key involved a man who had child pornography on his hard drive). Those who commit illegal or immoral acts may be best served by actually deleting their records, but I really don’t care if they get good advice or not. I do know that protecting data can be essential to the man holding a Bible study in his house in China, or a homosexual in Iran, both of whom face government persecution. By helping protect such individuals from their tyrannical governments, we can also ensure that liberal governments don’t have the chance to become more tyrannical. That’s the spirit behind the United States Fifth Amendment, and I want to see the law, society, and technology move in keeping with that spirit.
After hearing one of our lectures on MyLifeBits, it is pretty common for people to express other concerns about having their e-memories used against them. What if the GPS record of my position over time is used to infer that I was speeding? Could I get a ticket? What if the health information I am tracking shows the likelihood of a medical condition—could my insurance company use that as grounds to cancel my coverage? The complete answer to these issues will take time to develop, and will span technology (like the Swiss data bank), law (such as a recognition