Benjamin Wittes and Jane Chong examine how the law will respond as we become more cyborg-like, and the divide between human and machine becomes ever-more unstable. In particular, they consider how the law of surveillance will shift as we develop from humans who use machines into humans who partially are machines or, at least, who depend on machines pervasively for our most human-like activities.
Datacoup, one of the first companies to offer people money in exchange for their personal data, will pay up to $10 for access to your social network accounts, credit card transaction records, and other personal information, and will sell insights gleaned from that data to companies looking for information on consumer behavior.
What we see in the public with these hacking incidents seems to only be scratching the surface. There are entire communities and trading networks where the data that is stolen remains private and is rarely shared with the public.
As nude celebrity photos spilled onto the web over the weekend, blame for the scandal has rotated from the scumbag hackers who stole the images to a researcher who released a tool used to crack victims’ iCloud passwords to Apple, whose security flaws may have made that cracking exploit possible in the first place. But one…
For most people, privacy is little more than an illusion, one we create so we can feel less vulnerable as we move through the world, so we can believe some parts of ourselves are sacred and free from uninvited scrutiny. The further away you are from living as a white, heterosexual, middle-class man, the less privacy you enjoy – the more likely your illusions of privacy will be shattered when you least expect it.
As Lena Dunham succinctly put it, “The ‘don’t take naked pics if you don’t want them online’ argument is the ‘she was wearing a short skirt’ of the web.”
Owners of cloud services specifically refuse to take responsibility for data theft. So if you’re a celebrity whose nude pictures are splashed all over by hackers, all you can do is smile and wave.
“Although many cloud providers may encrypt the data communications between the device and the cloud, it does not mean that the image and data is encrypted when the data is at rest.
“If you can view the image in the cloud service, so can a hacker.”
What differentiates this celebrity phone hack from others is the sheer number of images that were released.
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