This week it was reported that the CEO Google predicts the end of privacy on the internet.
But, in part, the announce was an element within a campaign on “network neutrality”, i.e. ensuring that providers cannot filter and decide which content is published and distributed, controlling how the available resources are used.
The interesting issue is: part of the discussion on limiting or not access to the Internet introduces a “universal service” right similar to the one applied for the old monopoly phone or postal service.
In European Union (EU) the concept of privacy evolved from some limited definitions, say, in the United Kingdom, related to consumer protection, into a Directive (“Directive concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the electronic communications sector”), a kind of baseline for universal application within European Union.
Nonetheless, it has been constantly evolving, at first leading acting as a signpost, but eventually starting to develop by catching up with the evolution of technology.
But since when the Internet started allowing commercial uses, there has been a gradual shift- toward considering privacy not as an absolute right, but a negotiation.
At first the negotiation was limited to commercial parties, including consumer companies making new agreements to extract value from their knowledge of their consumers.
Eventually, consumers started thinking about the value of their own information, with choices ranging from selling their profile to telecom suppliers to be the “target” of SMS (and receive free services in exchange), fidelity cards so that the knowledge of your own purchasing habits give you “points” (and allows the supermarket chain to better target product offers), and so on.
My favourite? The Million dollar homepage, selling blocs of 100 pixels on his homepage: 10 thousand blocks, at 100 USD each…
Why did it work? Because it was the first case, and this attracted visitors (countless others tried to imitate it, including the creator).
But it is a showcase of the future ahead: and when we use Facebook, Myspace, and the like, we are in effect “selling” or, better, “bartering” bits of our own privacy in exchange for free services.
And anybody online can pretend to be whoever (s)he wants to be- this was the saying until not too long ago.
Recently, Facebook announced that they will add facial recognition, i.e. suggesting to link automatically pictures that you post on your profile on Facebook with the profiles of people on Facebook.
Probably, some other artificial intelligence spin-off will be able to spot, between the multiple profiles “sharing” the same profile picture (quite common, on the Internet), which one is the real one.
So, we are moving from controlling our own privacy, to affecting other people’s privacy when making our own privacy choices.
Technologies are at the same time converting our online presence into a way to identify us, and producing ways and means to verify the identity better than it has even been possible.
Again: when somebody advocates building genetic databases, they are asking to do more than simply identifying individuals.
Our DNA is not just a picture of how we or our families are now, but also of our history across generations.
Some legislatures already started few years ago to forbid using the DNA information to restrict or deny access to services, including health insurance (e.g. the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA))
As in any form of privacy regulation, the main issue is that each country has a different approach to what should be considered “legal”.
The EU is sometimes compared to a quilt, as if there were static relationships between its members- a XIX century concept.
Somebody proposed a multiple-speed Europe, and others a two- (or three-, or four-) tier structure, depending on the level of integration (e.g. a political union, just the Euro, or other forms).
For the time being, the EU is still evolving through continued tensions between an increased cohesion toward a political union, and shorter-term interests.
The difference with other unions is that the EU has been built through consensus and crisis management, not through military expansion.
If you read news about the EU, sometimes it seems as if two small details have been already cast in stone: the role of nation states within the EU, and the concept of nationality for their citizens.
But over the last few decades Europe moved from relationships between states to its current status through a series of agreements.
Sometimes there is more cohesion between regions belonging to different nation states than between the states they belong to.
This regional- or district-level cohesion usually derives from economic convenience, but eventually extending to social and cultural integration- potentially creating “clusters of cohesion” that represent alternative power structures.
Technology has played an enabling role, notably telecommunication and transportation advances.
There are some interesting side-effects for the concept of “identity”, but this will be discussed in another article, as it involves more technical aspects.
The main issue is that distance or physical contiguity are now almost irrelevant- and this allows the building of communities of interest spread across the continent.
After the end of the Cold War, the erosion of national identities while the European one is yet to be defined has been mirrored by a resurgence of extremist nationalist groups.
It is not the first time: the same happened after WWI- and the attempts to “defuse” the extremists by accepting some of their requests gave us a string of nationalist, sabre-rattling, governments- and another war.
The risk? By accepting the less extremist positions, without building at the same time a new identity and direction, some voters consider that the extremists are now part of the mainstream political environment.
And they need just to soften their tones, not their message or political program, to be seen a valid alternative: as shown by the recurring electoral successes of political parties whose program is against all that from the treaty of Rome on represents Europe.
When normal political parties openly discuss on how to cope with an economic crisis, the newly legitimized extremists, never really open to a democratic discussion, usually increase their votes, as they sound almost a voice of reasoning- constantly repeating economic platitudes.
Their approach extends also to their relationship with other political parties (seen as “the others”)- projecting an external image of internal unity.
Being all part of the EU implies that anything that is accepted at the national level eventually is potentially shared with other EU members, also to identify a common ground.
Most of these extremist positions are based on forging an identify around fear- fear of an undefined “other”. Read their material distributed to their own members: their economic policy is confused or obsolete at best, sounding often as the old mercantilist, zero-sum approach.
For the ordinary citizen, the EU still seems more a set of trees than a unified forest composed of trees.
And the simplistic approach offered by legitimized extremists risks of sounding easier to understand and accept, as it projects an aberrant but easier to understand “shared identity”.
Since I started travelling around Europe for work in the 1990s, I saw a constant evolution, followed by an increasing divergence between the complexity of the finely tuned institutional evolution, and the request to have something that is easier to identify with.
The last twenty years gradually legitimized extremist positions.
As if the European Union were an union “against”, not “for” something.
It is up to the mainstream politicians to communicate an alternative, positive model for the European identity.
And share this model- we Europeans are united behind a single flag, but still divided by our shared history- maybe we need a continental reconciliation commission, so that at least we will stop teaching a nationalist perspective.
The alternative? As in “Animal Farm”, a constant drifting, until, in the end, the European identity is defined by extremists who are not extremists any more- because they are the xenophobic mainstream.
Tags: eu, extremist, identity, nationality, privacy