Watching the Watchers
One of the things I wanted to accomplish in this blog is to talk about my music and the meaning behind my songs. The first one up is “Watching the Watchers”, a song I wrote and recorded for my first CD, Cosmology, but then re-recorded and released as a single in June 09. You can listen to the updated song here and read the lyrics here. This is the cover art:
The song is about the surveillance society we are living in. I was inspired to write it after reading “The Transparent Society” by David Brin (1998). In essence, our privacy has been eroding for a long time, and through the decade since the book was published, personal privacy is effectively gone. In addition to the information that is continuously collected by government and commercial enterprise, we are willing to publish personal information on ourselves on the sundry social networking sites across the web.
Given the scrutiny and transparency that we live under in our personal lives, Brin makes the argument that there needs to be two-way transparency, such that we are able to see who is collecting our information and what are they doing with it. In essence, we need to watch the watchers.
Whether it is credit scores, purchase information, the Google street-view-car, or any of the myriad ways information is being collected, we need to be concerned and diligent about how it is being used.
A fundamental question is who owns information about you? Do you own it? Should you control who has access to it? If someone is profiting from that information, should you have a right to royalities?
Personal privacy is pretty well gone. As for reigning in the watchers, I am afraid this is a cause that too few are concerned about and we will be too late to do anything about.