The Price of Being Watched

You are being watched, every day, every week, every second.

This week, I walked into my favorite class on communication-law, and ethics. The topic? An introspective look at how our privacy today is coming into question more and more; towing the line between what the government believes is ethical use, vs how those uses line up with morality.

Prior to the class, I believed already knew the basics of privacy law. Yet after a few hours of video lectures, I realized my knowledge hardly scratched the surface.

Flock cameras. A hot topic today, and a main focus of the lecture in class that day. These license plate readers are raising real Fourth and Fifth Amendment questions — unlawful search and seizure, and the right to due process, are both on the table. What bothered me though, was the scope: these systems collect where you go, what you're doing, and why you're there, even though the government has no explicit right to that information in the first place.

It is and has been a tension between security and surveillance that plays out at the federal level too, not just in local police departments.

As I recall, one video walked through how police departments are now logging every license plate that passes by, not just the plates connected to a crime. That means date, time, and location data on ordinary people going about ordinary days. 

There was a story about a man named Mike. Mike hadn't done anything wrong, yet hundreds of photos of his daily life sat in a database anyway, because storage is cheap now, so departments file the data away "just in case." In case of what? In case a man with no criminal record with a loving family in the suburbs goes rogue? In case he ends up tied to a drug cartel?

That "just in case" mentality turns into one massive, searchable database with near-infinite hits on where Americans are traveling. It's not hard to see how that could be misused. In one example, the NYPD reportedly used license plate readers near mosques to track who was visiting them.

Look anyone in the eyes and tell them that's a constitutional invasion of privacy. If you can, you're either wrong or a psychopath.

And yet, license plate readers are only one piece of the pie here. 

Cell tower dumps can show every phone that was using a specific tower at a specific time. Stingrays go a step further, sending out signals to detect which phones are inside which buildings. Police departments across the country hold a huge amount of this kind of surveillance footage and data, and the lecture I got this from was blunt about the risk: that much data sitting in one place gets abused. 

This may come as a surprise, but this isn't a new problem; the reporting on it goes back to at least 2015.

Something I appreciated from our lecture was the framing of this privacy crisis. It simply isn't a bipartisan issue. It isn't a Democrat or Republican problem, and even so, the diverse problem is too not reserved for "young people" either. It's a problem that affects you and me directly.

Here's the part that really got me thinking. If the government directly spies on citizens, that's a Fourth or Fifth Amendment claim waiting to happen. Yet if a private company, like Palantir as shown in our lecture that day, collects that same information, there's no constitutional violation. No violation of rights. No claim to be made, and all because the Constitution restrains government action, not private companies.

So what does the government do in such cases? How does the government grab that precious private information?

It simply buys or requests the data from the private company instead. That workaround is why media literacy now includes something as basic as being stingy with your own phone number and email.

Later on in the lecture, we covered "contracts of adhesion," -agreements where one party holds all the power. 

Every app's terms of service works this way. Once a company owns your data, it's theirs, subscription or no subscription. The case that stuck with me involved a lawsuit at Disney World, where a wrongful death suit was reportedly blocked because a Disney Plus subscription's terms of service contained a clause barring the person from suing. That single detail reframed how I think about clicking "I agree."

Our professor described data mining and behavioral tracking using an art metaphor: up close, a series of dots looks random, but stepping back, those same dots form a complete picture. That's a digital dossier. Facebook's data scandal was used as the clearest example, where the company could reportedly predict traits like gender, sexual orientation, and political affiliation with something in the range of 95 percent accuracy.

That's the "third-party doctrine" in action: once you hand information to a company voluntarily, you lose control over how it gets used downstream, sold, and resold. 

We can think of this via a term that came up towards the end of the lecture: "online tattoos." Facial recognition tools can pull thousands of records from a single photo almost instantly, and unlike a real tattoo, this kind of data doesn't fade. It outlives us, which is a strange kind of digital immortality nobody signed up for, yet everyone is bound to.

What tied the whole unit together, oddly, were the Greek myths. Sisyphus was mentioned, and he felt like a stand-in for reputation, something we're always pushing uphill and never fully control. Narcissus too was a warning against getting too absorbed in our own reflection, digital or otherwise.

The line that has stayed with me since class is a question posed and attributed to Jorge Luis Borges: "how else can you threaten someone other than with death?" The answer, apparently, is immortality. After a lecture of learning how permanent our digital footprint really is, that answer doesn't feel abstract anymore. It feels like the whole point.

A.I. Disclaimer: This post was made in collaboration with Claude. While the majority of the words and opinions written in this post are indeed my own, I asked Claude for help in order to format how I would go about writing each section...