This article is from WeChat official account:CITIC Publishing (ID: citicpub), author: A letter, editor: Chu Qi, head Figure from: unsplash
If you want to select the high-frequency news hot words in the minds of Chinese people in 2020, Ashin believes that “privacy security” can be ranked in the top three.
Let’s talk about it first: More than 50 Chinese apps have been removed overseas before, and most of the statements given are similar: “There is a risk of privacy leakage.”
Let’s talk about China: On September 29, the 46th “Statistical Report on China’s Internet Development Status” released by the China Internet Network Information Center showed that As of June 2020, the number of Internet users in my country reached 940 million, of which Over 20% of Internet users’ personal information has been leaked.
In June, a hot search titled “Mobile App Frequently Launched to Collect Privacy” even put everyone at risk.
Some netizens have discovered that many apps installed on their mobile phones frequently self-start. Some apps can even access phone photos and files nearly 25,000 times within a dozen minutes.
Followingly, in August, another media exposed the chaos of privacy trafficking on the Internet. It only costs ten dollars to spy on other people’s bedrooms, except for hotels, guest houses, fitting rooms and other places that are also hardest hit…
This seems to confirm an internet buzzword: “In the era of big data, your privacy is running naked.” So, is our privacy really so transparent?
1. Some of your fears are magnified
In the book “A Brief History of Privacy,” the author David Vincent pointed out that in recent hundreds of years, under the impact of new technologies, people have either been too arrogant and indifferent to privacy issues. , Either is too scared, and the grass and trees are all soldiers.
Unfortunately, with the rise of social networks in the past 20 years, we seem to have made both mistakes.
Take the widely circulated saying “The App on your phone is monitoring your every move”, which is a bit too sensational.
Since last year, many netizens have successively stated that for the things mentioned in offline chat the day before, the next day there will be related information pushes appearing in some conspicuous positions in some apps, making people can’t help but back. Chill:
Not only in China, similar doubts are also common in the world. A keyword search such as “mobile phone tapping” can immediately pop up tens of millions of results.
So, are mobile apps really monitoring our privacy all the time? From the perspective of technology and cost, if technology companies want to implement these practices, it may be a bit outweighed.
First of all, if you continue to collect and record your conversations, it will definitely produce obvious traffic and power consumption, which is hard to not notice.
Secondly, the accuracy of voice conversion directly into the microphone is sometimes unsatisfactory, not to mention the complex and uncontrollable behavior of background recording, the effect of voice conversion can be imagined.
In a day’s conversation, the content of interest for advertising is very sparse, and the recognition and conversion effects are poor.
Be aware that advertising has a cost. More accurate clicks, searches, and consumption data are not used. It is unreasonable and uneconomical to use recordings, which are expensive and poor-quality data.
That’s why experts from the National App Special Governance Working Group said:
There is no need to use eavesdropping such a complicated and advanced method to do such a thing according to a certain individual’s shopping needs.
There are many reasons for accurate push, but you feel as if it is your own cause, as if you have been ‘hacked’.
Psychologically, this happens to be the same as the chat contentThe coincidence of the advertisement is called “Survivor Bias“: People only pay attention to the results after a certain screening, but are not aware of the screening process.
But apart from “App monitoring”, it does not mean that in the Internet age, our privacy is not at risk of exposure.
As David Holtzman, the author of “The Dead Privacy” warns:
Our privacy is melting faster than Arctic glaciers, and the rate of technological erosion exceeds the protection of the legal system.
The more terrifying remarks come from the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. As early as 2010, he said: “You no longer have privacy. Overcome it!“
Why is it so difficult to protect your privacy?
I’m afraid we have to go back to the end of the Middle Ages to explore the history when the concept of “privacy” was born.
Second, the popularity of lockable toilets and bathrooms and privacy
Friday, July 13, 1341, the “London Nuisance Ruling File” recorded:
Isabel, the widow of John Lutter, filed a complaint against leather merchant John Trape, saying that the man’s house was next to her garden in the parish of St. John de Wallbrook. Four of the windows were broken. The servant can see through them into her garden.
After inspecting the location of the incident, the judgment requires the defendant to repair his windows within 40 days. In “A Brief History of Privacy”, author David Vincent pointed out that this may be the earliest verdict on privacy violations.
What is a bit surprising is that it is the evolution of house design that promotes the rise of the concept of “privacy”.
In the next two centuries, changes in privacy revolved around the continuous differentiation of room furnishings and use.
As the wealth gap expands, the wealthy who have benefited the most from economic expansion can use mansions and beautiful houses to show off their wealth, and the decoration of living spaces becomes more professional. More and more wealthy farmers have converted their houses into two floors, and the number of independent rooms has increased to 6 or more.
“Living room”(sitting room) and “Lounge”( Lounge) These two words appeared in English in 1806 and 1881 respectively.
In the “British House Planning Guide” published during this period stated, “No matter how small or compact the house is, the family must have privacy.”
“Downton Abbey” stills
For the top British, the first principle is that the family room mustIt must be kept secret… Therefore, no matter how small it is, the servants’ quarters must be separated from the main house, so that the information spread within their respective boundaries can be invisible and inaudible.
In the period between the two world wars and after the war, the improvement of housing conditions, the expansion of personal space, and the popularization of lockable indoor toilets and bathrooms have made people generally established expectations for protecting body privacy.
Three, the proliferation of new technologies and pornography
But “privacy” is obviously not limited to the home.
After the Middle Ages, with the reliable postal service, the improvement of basic literacy and the industrialization of printing, the communications and publishing industries flourished, making the concept of privacy rapidly extend to the invisible and invisible text information. Unknown area. “A Brief History of Privacy” referred to it as “Virtual Privacy“.
The rise of virtual privacy, especially marked by the increase in personal letters
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With the ever-expanding content of daily newspapers and weekly magazines, editors have discovered that the booming pornography is more attractive to the public, and privacy can turn into money.
Their profit comes from people’s enthusiasm for gossip, and their mode of communication has changed from oral to paper. After the 19th century, people’s daily life became more difficult to be spied on by outsiders, which also breeds curiosity about pornography.
Many cheap weekly magazines have discovered that the barrier between exposure of scams and spying on privacy is not tight, and they are aware of the profitability.
For example, the cover story of a magazine “Paul Pry” published in 1856 was “Secret Memoirs” written by a mistress of Louis Napoleon.
Napoleon
It is hard to imagine that the courts at the time not only did not protect citizens’ “privacy”, on the contrary, they also supported the media to freely publish obscene details in family scandals in the public domain.
So other tabloids followed suit. What’s even more frightening is that new technologies have reduced the cost of photography, and more “exciting and colorful” lace stories have sprung up, further exacerbating the problems of the publishing industry.
Samuel Warren
Until 1890, a reporter from the “Boston Saturday Evening News” broke into the wedding banquet organized by lawyer Samuel Warren for his daughter with a camera. This was originally just a family dinner, but it was arranged into vulgar and distorted mass entertainment news.
In a fit of anger, Warren and another lawyer, Louis Brandeis, published a paper entitled “Privacy” in the Harvard Law Review, for the first time, the “right to privacy” was clearly proposed. Concept:
The article attempts to establish a new legal right amidst chaotic judgments and legislation. Oppose all forms of nuisance and consider it a blatant violation of family private affairs.
“The media is trampling the boundary between private property and etiquette in all directions,” the article wrote, “Gossip is no longer the source of emptiness and depravity, but has become a trade chased by the industry and the shameless. To satisfy the lascivious Appetites, various details in sexual relations were put on the daily newspaper column to advertise.”
The article also mentioned: “The pre-civilization people’s lives are becoming increasingly tense and complicated. It is necessary to stay away from the disturbances of the world in a timely manner. With the improvement of cultural accomplishment, people are also more sensitive to public places, solitude and privacy. It is even more essential to people.”
Louis Brandeis
I have to say that this article was quite cutting-edge at the time. Regrettably, more than 100 years have passed. Today’s news media and various inventions have “infringed on personal privacy and caused people to suffer mental pain and distress. Compared with purely physical harm, there is a situation that is worse than that” It is still happening frequently.
In addition to camera technology, the subsequent emergence of every new technology, such as telegraph, telephone, Internet, social network, smart phone, etc., gives people more opportunities to peek into the private lives of strangers than previous technologies.
“A Brief History of Privacy” argues that technological advancements are not onlyThe private sector has brought progress, but the situation of privacy protection has returned to a hundred years ago.
Four. Conclusion
The history of privacy is a combination of noise and silence. Regardless of any social level and any era, there is very little absolute privacy in personal communications.
In the beginning of the 21st century, countries all over the world were seduced by the endless possibilities of digital communication and plagued by endless information. People have become less and less aware of how to distinguish what information is necessary.
Thousands of years of history tell us that privacy is always a “secondary” consideration in the face of larger issues. The concept of privacy has not been clearly defined until now.
We still have a long way to go to realize the era of real privacy protection for all citizens.
This article is from WeChat official account:CITIC Publishing (ID: citicpub), author: A letter