Guardian Angels
I’ve never been quite as exercised as most people about surveillance; it implies that privacy is a fundamental of the human condition, whereas for most people it’s a recent and local idea (try asking about privacy in an African village compound or a Chinese hutong).
Anyhow, in the West we’ve had ubiquitous surveillance for several millennia, under the guise of God and His angels. Backed up by the promise of heaven and the threat of hell, it was policed by a whole hierarchy of clerics, who could conveniently add a more or less infinite list of infringements the Deity was watching out for, including resisting the Divinely-approved authority of the monarch and the aristocracy. Of course, there was no direct evidence that any of this was actually happening, but that was dealt with by making doubt a sin in itself, with its own dedicated saint, Doubting Thomas.
Then came the Enlightenment, which encouraged people not to take anything on trust — least of all religion — but instead to find out for themselves, by exploration, investigation and experiment. And when they began to do so, discovering among other inconveniences that given how long it takes rocks to form and how deeply some fossils were buried, the Bible could not actually be the literal truth, it slightly did for the theory of an all-seeing deity in the clouds.
Step forward Jeremy Bentham, top Utilitarian, champion of reason and other good things including women’s rights, legalising same-sex relationships and banning corporal punishment — not bad for the early 19th century. Jeremy was in some ways the spiritual ancestor of Ray Kurzweil, having been by his own instructions preserved after death and still on show in University College London, though perhaps disappointingly for Ray there’s been no obvious sign of life for the past 180 years.
The panopticon (Greek for ‘all-seeing’) was actually an idea of Jeremy’s younger brother, Samuel, who while working in Russia for Prince Potemkin hit upon the ‘central inspection principle’ , to facilitate the training and supervision of unskilled workers by experienced craftsmen. Try saying ‘Potemkin’s Panopticon’ after a few vodkas and you’ll see why it didn’t catch on in Russia, but Jeremy spotted that the idea of a single authority able to watch everybody else, all the time, could be handy for a prison: a circular building, with the cells arranged around the outer wall and the centre dominated by an inspection tower. Bentham expected that this ‘new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example’ would ensure that the prisoners would modify their behaviour and apply their noses to the grindstone, if they knew what was good for them.
(He also invented a telephone system for communicating with the cells, in the 1820s — read more here and, while you’re at it, make a donation to Wikipedia, for reasons I’m about to make clear).
So decisions are already being made in the UK whether to deploy, in the fight against Covid19, a technology most of us already carry, and with which, in combination with a magic bracelet or two, many of us already obsessively track our own health and bodily functions.
And we all already know that most of this data is kept not only by ourselves but by various other entities, to whom we give it in exchange for the random pleasure of being offered things we don’t want, and the new sport of Who Does the Algorithm Think I Am?
In the past week, the biggest download on the App Store has been Houseparty. Like Zoom for children. I thought I’d manifest my trend-surfing chops by installing it on my phone, till I found it wouldn’t work without my location, camera, microphone and a list of all my contacts. And the planet’s twenty-somethings are flocking to it.
Nevertheless people are still concerned about the implications of handing this data over to the government or the NHS, citing China’s surveillance state. I had early experience of this in 1982, making a BBC ‘Horizon’ film about the one-child policy. What we wanted was to show that this was actually an equitable way to solve a nationwide problem: that the only way to deal with a mass emergency (too many people for too little food) was to impose it equally on everybody.
The government minders who followed us around for eight weeks, gussying up villages before filming and attempting to distract us with banquets of sparrows on sticks, had no problem showing its draconian imposition: we were welcomed in to film an abortion at 6 ½ months, without anaesthetic, in an unheated clinic, in February. What they couldn’t get was that we wanted to show Chinese people as autonomous entities, with natural selfishness that they were nevertheless prepared to see overridden for the common good. The Chinese government didn’t trust its citizens to be educated and responsible enough to make the right decision.
In this pandemic, smartphone tech has been deployed in China, Korea and Singapore to help track the virus and stop it spreading. China continues to follow the policy of surveillance by forced imposition, with consequences. Singapore’s government produced this app, TraceTogether, for ‘voluntary downloading’.
And as John Naughton reports, South Korean developers wrote “Corona 100m”, a voluntary app that allows people to see data about corona virus patients with whom they may have come into contact — but not their names. It was launched on 11 February and had a million downloads in the first 17 days. (He also cites an early precursor, Jon Crowcroft’s prototype FluPhone app back in 2011).
So what’s it to be here? Smartphone apps for voluntary self-help, or imposed surveillance and control? Of course, with either there’s a fundamental problem: 22% of UK adults don’t have a smartphone — which rises to 55% aged over 55, the group most at risk. It may not seem very clever to deploy a technology, either voluntarily or forcibly, that’s only available to fewer than half of the people it’s supposed to be helping — but it may be the least worst option. And if it’s done on the Singapore or Korean model, it may even prototype a new world of keeping personal data personal.
If the app route is rejected, we have to choose between information or coercion. And much as we might like to see the police equipped to take revenge on people who spit and cough in their faces, once they get used to their emergency powers, they may be reluctant to renounce them again and return to shuffling paper and waiting for Deliveroo Time.
So we fall back, as we tried smugly to persuade the Chinese back in 1982, on an informed and educated population, capable of making the right choices for the common good. I hear your hollow laughter from here…
