On the 18th of February Karin Spaink was our guest. And we were very happy to have her!

By the month our privacy becomes more endangered. So many things are happening right now that constrain or violate our privacy, but the general public and the politicians don’t seem to care much. Karin shed some light on all that is happening right now and gave us all a good fright.

Information is stored digitally more and more. Because it hardly costs anything to store digital information, it’s saved longer. Before, no-one knew what you had seen on TV. When you are watching digital TV, Big Brother is watching right back at you. Digitilization also makes it easier than ever before to piece together bits of information from different sources. Karin and others hacked the Electronic Patient Dossier to demonstrate how unsafe it was. If she had wanted to, she could have easily killed people, simply by changing their blood type.

Centralization of data means that data is stored on more levels, every level vulnerable to unauthorized access. It also turns out that the higher up your information is stored, the more lax the security gets. This development also means that more obsolete data about you is around, because the data always trickles upwards with some delay.

Function creep is the term Karin used for the phenomenon that f.e. laws are implemented with the reason being terrorism, and later used to track down copyright infringements.

Monitoring people is no longer done based on the risk that they are to society, or on the higher chance of success that monitoring will lead to. Monitoring is done simply because it can be done. The general feeling is that society will always be safer with than without monitoring. And not only that, more and more parties are doing it. Karin showed us a Google Street View picture of a man taking out the garbage, with food wrappers and other telltale signs of his lifestyle on display for the whole world. And, as Karin pointed out, it might not even be his own house, it could also be his mistresses’!

Our rights are decreasing. For example for paper mail there is a post secret; no-one is allowed to open your mail and read it. Since paper mail has as good as dissapeared this right has too. For e-mail we have no such right. One of the reasons it’s very difficult to do anything about all this is that more and more of our legislation is made on a European level. And some of the rules are not even in legislation but in trade agreements, which is very strange. Karin told us about the ‘3 strikes and you’re out’-bill, where the mere suspicion of copyright infringement could lead you to loose the right to use the internet.

We don’t seem to mind all this, because we have nothing to hide, don’t we? In fact we are giving away lots of information voluntarily. But while we are becoming ever more visible to our governements, governments are making themselves less transparent. Karin concludes with the question: If I should have nothing to hide, why does my government?

Photos were taken by Arthur de Smidt. Post written by Marjon Wiendels.

Karins slides can be found here.