Even if you don’t cruise the superhighway, your personal profile will. A portrait of you in 1’s and 0’s, the language of computers, will exist in cyberspace. The profile could be so complete that it will be like having another self living in a parallel dimension; it is a self you cannot see, but one that affects your life just the same. Even if you do not own a personal computer and never intend to, you are part of the revolution.
Someday soon, the whole universe of information about you – credit report, insurance records, medical history, you-name-it – may be recorded on a little smart card that fits in your wallet. Most important, computers assure that whatever information is out there is accessible. No more roaming door-to-door, file-to-file. A kid with a keyboard can get in to access your information. What’s more, because the information exists in cyberspace rather than real space, it can be “stolen” (copied) without your even knowing it.
The device that has outstripped all other threats to privacy is the computer. Some say the computer is heralding no less than a new phase of civilization. Whether computers will alter our notion of the human condition is in dispute, but what is inarguable is that we will have to change the way we think about keeping certain information private.
Information about all of us is now collected not only by the old standbys, the IRS and FBI, but also by the MVB, MIB, NCOA, and NCIC, as well as credit bureaus, credit unions, and credit card companies. We now have cellular phones, which are different from cordless phones, which are different from what we used to think of as phones. We worry about e-mail, voice mail, and junk mail. And something with the perky name Clipper Chip – developed specifically to allow government eavesdropping on coded electronic communications – is apparently the biggest threat of all.
Office workers are not the only ones who feel they are being shadowed. Already, global positioning systems allow truck drivers to be reached on the road, but can also monitor the length of their rest stops. Cellular phone systems can locate anyone using a phone in their car. And there’s more to come. Olivetti and Xerox are developing an “active badge,” a device which allows workers to be tracked around the company premises. The badge reveals its wearer’s location by emitting an infrared signal every 15 seconds to a network … In the face of such ominous devices, workplace privacy advocates take some comfort from the hope that eventually employers will discover that extensive monitoring is bad for business.
If cyberspace is deprived of public forums, we’ll get a lot of what we’re already used to: endless home shopping, mindless entertainment and dissent-free chat. If people can avoid the unpalatable issues that might arise in these forums, going on-line will become just another way for elites to escape the very nonvirtual realities of injustice in our world. As the wired life grows exponentially in the coming years, we’ll all be better off if we can find a street corner in cyberspace.
Congress and state and local governments [could] establish forums in cyberspace dedicated explicitly to public discourse … These public forums must be visible, accessible and at least occasionally unavoidable – they must be street corners in cyberspace.
Digital networks such as the Internet, for example, are so flexible that it is practically impossible to imagine the range of architectural choices that lie ahead.
The Internet could fragment into a bunch of separate spheres, each with its own gatekeeper. It won’t happen right away, since most of the people who run Internet discussion lists and the like are still primarily interested in attracting people, not keeping them away.
Cyberspace is shaping up to be more like Cyberbia than Cyberkeley … These extreme alternatives prevent us from moving toward [a] … hybrid vision [without which] it is unlikely that we will realize the democratic possibilities of this new technology.