Angelique Carson reports on a recent IAPP Canada Privacy Symposium presentation:
If marine biologist-turned-best-selling author Peter Watts is an expert on anything, it’s mammals. Speaking to 400 or so privacy pros and regulators gathered last week at the IAPP Canada Privacy Symposium to talk privacy and data protection, he used that experience to send a rather jarring — and anything but conventional — message:
Mammals don’t respond well to surveillance. We consider it a threat. It makes us paranoid, and aggressive and vengeful. But we’ll never win against the giant corporations and governments that watch us, Watts argued, so all we can develop is a surefire defense.
Think “scorched earth.” If we can’t protect the data, Watts posited, maybe we should burn it to the ground.
Hear him out: Mammals will always respond to the surveillance threat as they would any threat — with aggression, in the same way the natural selection process has shaped every other life form on this planet.
“Anybody who thinks their own behavior isn’t at least partly informed by those legacy circuits has not been paying attention,” he said.
Watts pointed to author David Brin’s assertion during his keynote recently at the IAPP’s Global Privacy Summit that while our instinct is to pass a law aimed at telling governments and corporations to “stop looking” at us, we should instead turn our gaze to them in the name of reciprocity.
“It’s not telling them do not look,” Brin said during his speech. “It’s looking back.”
But Edward Snowden is currently living in Russia after he tried to “look back.” And as someone who’s worked a lot in the past with mammals, Watts knows that, biologically, looking back is a bad idea: “To get into a staring contest with a large, aggressive, territorial mammal primed to think of eye contact as a threat display … I can’t recommend it.”
“Natural selection favors the paranoid,” Watts said.
H/T to Bruce Schneier for the link.
