Have you taken a DNA test yet? You know the ones. You send away for a kit, then spit in a test tube and send it back to Ancestry or another outfit that tells you where your ancestors hailed from. If you choose to share your DNA results, you might even find some long-lost relatives.
I have done this and learned what I already knew -- my ancestors are all from Scotland and Ireland. And no surprising relatives were uncovered -- those who showed up were no closer than third or fourth cousins, so I guess none of my near family is participating at this point.
In her recent novel The Candy House, Jennifer Egan takes the concept of shared DNA information one step further, perhaps several steps further, and imagines a world where you can upload all of your memories to a box and, if you choose, share your memories with others who are doing the same. And it is not just the things you actually consciously remember that are uploaded. The entire store of everything you have ever experienced is disgorged.
Thus, if, for instance, your parents have uploaded and shared their memories, you can choose to access their memories of a given day or time and learn more about their lives. At first intriguing, but, upon further reflection, horrifying. This would clearly be a Pandora's box -- one where something once seen, could not be unseen.
Just imagine the mental and psychic overload.
Of course, none of us would choose to implement the memory box, would we? I can hear you saying emphatically, I would never do that. Yet I have shared my DNA information on Ancestry and, if you haven’t done this, you have likely expressed political views on social media or taken one of those innocuous-seeming quizzes that are actually designed to collect data about you and your habits.
Why do we do this? I remember reading George Orwell's 1984 back in the 1960s and being horrified by the notion of Big Brother. Yet, we have effectively invited Big Brother into our homes. (Don't be too quick to congratulate yourself if you eschew social media. Notice when you send an email to a friend in which you mention that you are looking for a new backpack, and the next day an ad for backpacks flashes on the screen while you are doing a Google search for something entirely unrelated.)
And then, there's this. Unless you have expressly asked to have it removed (and I hate to think what it would take to do this), there is an image of your house on Google Earth. Further, anyone can look up your house on Zillow or Redfin and find out how much your paid for it and the amount of your property taxes. Sure, this information is public record, but how many people bothered to go to a courthouse and look it up before an online search was possible.
If the British mystery series I watch on TV are any indication, it would appear that there are CCTV cameras everywhere in the UK, recording everyone all of the time. And I have read that sophisticated facial imagery allows Chinese officials to pick someone out of a crowd of thousands (and then, presumably, pick them up). It would not surprise me to find such technology coming here to the U.S. very soon. Maybe it's already here.
None of this seems to be very troublesome to most people under 40. They appear to have little concern about privacy. So is privacy now as quaint as, say, a family sharing one phone tethered to the wall?
Maybe if you never experienced privacy, you don't know what you're missing. Or maybe you won't care until someone posts naked pictures of you online and you find out how nearly impossible it is to have them taken down.
I, for one, remember privacy fondly. As I have written before, I miss letters. Remember sealed envelopes? Unless someone steamed one open or plundered your box full of love letters, these missives were eyes-only.
What a concept.
Still, it does seem that it is nearly impossible to preserve privacy without going completely off the grid, and who among us is ready, or even able, to do this?
I will leave you with this challenge: Google yourself. And then tell me what you think (in the public comments to this public blog).
