It can be hard to evade the sight of wall-mounted cameras--but other smart cities technologies are almost undetectable.
The various nodes where sensors and other tech could detect your movements through the city.
LED glasses might not trick biometric cameras—but they will definitely attract the attention of folks on the street.
For example: A site called Internet Noise
searches for randomized phrases and opens five fresh tabs every ten
seconds. (I left it running as I wrote this, and now my browser history
includes pictures of badgers, an online mattress store, an NPR article
about the Supreme Court, and a research paper about gene mutation in
hamsters.) As a cloaking technique, it’s not a perfect veil, writes Emily Dreyfess in Wired:
“It’s actually too random. It doesn’t linger on sites very long, nor
does it revisit them. In other words, it doesn’t really look human, and
smart-enough tracking algorithms likely know that.” The site is more of a
protest over Congress rolling back a not-yet-implemented FCC regulation that would have stymied ISPs from selling users’ browsing history.
Still, Tien advocates a certain degree of self-protection.
He views these measures as a kind of digital hygiene—the “equivalent of
washing your hands when you go to the bathroom,” or getting a flu shot.
But he stresses that they’re only a partial prophylactic: “Nothing that
will make you immune from the problem.”
Other techniques include employing Tor—a network that tries to anonymize the source and destination of your web searches by routing traffic along a convoluted path—and Signal, which offers encrypted messaging and phone calls. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self-Defense toolkit also suggests particular tools and behaviors for specific scenarios. People participating in protests, the guide suggests,
might consider stripping meta-data from photos, to make it harder to
match them with identities and locations. But this isn’t a perfect
solution, either, Tien says, because you can only control what you post.
“If I take a picture and scrub the metadata, that’s one thing,” Tien
says. “If my friend takes a picture of me, I can’t do anything about
that.” The Intercept produced a video illustrating step-by-step instructions for phone security at a protest, from adding an access passcode to turning on encryption settings.
On a daily basis, Tien tells me, “I don’t think you or I can
exercise much meaningful self-help against the kind of tracking we’ll
be seeing in real-world physical space.” That’s fodder for a point he
makes about a fundamental asymmetry in the information that’s available
to the bodies that install the cameras and those who are surveilled by
them. There are relatively few laws relating to the expectation of
privacy in a public space. The officials and organizations that install
sensors, cameras, and ever-more-sensitive devices, he says, “have much
more money than you do, much more technology than you do, and they don’t
have to tell you what they’re doing.”
Ultimately, Tien and Gidari both take a long view, arguing
that the most payoff will come from pushing for more transparency about
just what this technology is up to. Part and parcel of that, Tien says,
is resisting the idea that data is inherently neutral. The whole messy,
jumbled mass of it contains information that could have tangible
consequences on people’s lives. Tien says citizens need to remind their
elected officials what’s at stake with data—and in the process, maybe
“dampen their enthusiasm” for the collection of it.
He points out that sanctuary cities could be a prime example.
There, he says, some advocates of immigrant rights are realizing that
data collected via municipal surveillance “might not be such a good
thing when we’re interested in protecting immigrants and the federal
government is interested in deporting them.”
The practical strategies for opting out—of becoming
invisible to some of these modes of surveillance—are imperfect, to say
the least. That’s not to say that data collection is inherently
nefarious, Gidari says—as he wrote in a blog post for the CIS,
“no one wants to live in a ‘dumb’ city.” But he says that opting out
shouldn’t need to be the default: “I don’t think you should have been
opted in in the first place.”
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