Paper Title

-- By JustinPerez - 10 Mar 2022

“I’m Here”… Just in Case

As we enter the next decade of smart devices and their alleged purposes, companies have begun to tie their devices to safety. Whether it presents itself as, “Alexa, call the police,” or “Hi its Siri, I have detected an abnormal heart rate,” or “Ring, you have an unexpected visitor at your front door.” Safety is inherent in human nature. Everyone wants to feel safe and secure. For a one-time purchase price for the hardware, these devices take advantage of those feelings in exchange for listening to every sound in your home, tracking extensive biometric data, and watching every second of what occurs at your home. Scott Goodson in an article for Forbes quotes a phrase he read on Metafilter stating,“If you are not paying for it, you are the product.” All of these companies are not providing these services because of their altruism, instead, it is for data collection. Under the current structure, the motive serves capitalist gain purposes, but as is discussed in class, we are one butterfly landing on a petal away from total state surveillance. Every citizen in the United States that subscribes to one of these services has handed a sliver of their privacy for convenience and now the perceived benefit of safety.

But why should we care? I have struggled with this question since the first class. Reflecting on it generally, I feel there is a disbelief that our society is so susceptible to the forms of oppression other countries face through total surveillance. My generation, the generation that mass consumes these products, has never seen oppression in that way. In my 23 years of life, the only event in the U.S, in which I felt my privacy was infringed upon by the government, was during the protesting in the summer of 2020. Police used access to social media to identify Black Lives Matter protestors in order to identify suspects for crimes.

Looking at the matter with a more specific lens, why should I care about companies tracking my data with the potential to exploit its use, when police officers infringe the privacy rights of people of color each day without repercussions for various reasons. The 4th amendment protects only as much as the police abide by those principles in practice. Although evidence will not be admissible in a potential legal proceeding due to the exclusionary rule, people of color and lower income individuals that find themselves using one of these devices will still be subject to police misconduct that often relies on workarounds of the 4th amendment.

As we move further and further towards the normalization of these services, O’Connor’s deciding vote in Florida v. Riley becomes more important in determining whether individuals' usage of these services result in reasonable expectations of privacy. In Riley, the court dealt with a determination of whether defendants had an expectation of privacy when a helicopter that was in public airways at an altitude at which members of the public travel with sufficient regularity is one society is prepared to recognize as reasonable. As these devices continue to push the limits of “social connectedness” and “overall safety,” we find ourselves in the wilderness of which services are reasonably expected to be considered private and which are not. Does the family with a Ring device at their front door not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, which allows police to tap into their camera in order to surveil crime in the neighborhood, because most Ring owners post these videos for the public anyways? Or does the alleged suspect have a reasonable expectation of privacy that his biometric data recorded by his Apple Watch will not be used as a pseudo-polygraph machine during an interrogation?

All of these devices are here, in most people’s homes in some way. The question is not whether we should trust the government to protect our privacy interests, but whether enough individuals realize in time to protect their privacy interests in their data. Based on how reliant on these services my generation is, these privacy interests are ripe for exploitation were the day to arise.

Goodson Scott, If You're Not Paying For It, You Become The Product, Forbes (March 5, 2012). Rihl Juliette, If your mom can go in and see it, so can the cops’: How law enforcement is using social media to identify protesters in Pittsburgh, Public Source (August 6, 2020).

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