Personal privacy is a basic right, not a privilege

THE temptation to check-in may be strong, but giving our kids the independence to be left alone is essential to their wellbeing, writes James Morrow.

CAN kids ever be left alone?

Increasingly the answer society seems to be giving is, “no”. Particularly not online — or even in their own heads.

This week this newspaper reported that independent schools in NSW are looking at installing something called eSafe Global Monitoring Technology on student laptops, monitoring all activity — even documents written offline and USB sticks inserted into the device — for “threat markers” for everything from bullying and depression to pornography and abuse.

This is all being done, of course, for the children, whose parents and teachers will be alerted whenever a red flag goes up.

But while cyber-bullying is terrible, perverts lurk online, and (as witnessed tragically in Florida this week) deranged thoughts can lead to terrible actions, we should pause and ask if there might be other ways to combat these threats.

Because taken to its logical conclusion, the introduction of these sorts of monitoring schemes means we could soon be raising an entire generation to think that they have no expectation of real personal privacy.

The kids of today should be afforded the privacy opportunities that their parents were. (Pic: iStock)

Yet personal privacy and the right to one’s own conscience is an exceptional thing not to be given away lightly. It’s something which sets countries like Australia apart from most of the rest of the world throughout history.

This is the point made starkly by George Orwell in his dark satire of the Soviet Union, “1984”, in which an entire population is monitored constantly for crimes like “ungoodthink” which might go against the state.

Totalised surveillance of a young person’s jottings, scribbles, chat logs and thoughts means that students are likely to self-censor and not explore ideas — particularly difficult ones — lest they trigger trouble with parents or the school.

Last week I was talking with a friend who lives in Singapore, where a vast network of facial recognition cameras means that the government essentially knows where everybody is at any given moment. He told me the story of how recently they received a visit from the cops because his daughter, quite innocently, put a small scratch on a vehicle walking her pushbike through a car park.

The owner complained, the cops reviewed the footage (because there’s footage of everything) and the computers told them exactly where to go. No charges were laid, but my friend’s insurance policy took a hit.

What’s wrong with children having privacy? (Pic: supplied)

On the one hand, you might say, what’s wrong with that?

After all, Singapore is clean and tidy and so crime-free that many shopkeepers, American business news network CNBC reported recently, many businesses don’t even bother locking up.

That, plus the fact that they’re not shy about breaking out the cane for graffiti vandals, is almost enough to make such a regimen seem attractive.

But as nice as it would be to live in a tag-free city, when you add authoritarian politics to the mix, this sort of total surveillance state quickly goes from the kind of creepy to the downright sinister.

Take China, where total surveillance is being tied to a “social credit system” that will track all of its citizens activities, particularly online, and score them based on how well they tow the (communist) party line and act as a “trustworthy” citizen.

Do well, and things like getting a passport become a lot easier. Do poorly, and see your prospects for housing and employment drop — among other things.

Already we live in an age when holding the “wrong” opinion can cause someone no end of trouble, whether officially through human rights bodies or unofficially through Twitter mobs and the like.

Add into the mix the approaching age of artificial intelligence and quantum computing and it isn’t hard to see how omnipresent algorithms could do a lot more — and a lot worse — than keep us all safe.

Unless we want the teens of today designing the surveillance state of tomorrow, we should give them a little space, and teach them to hold on to it. Even if it has a few dark corners and scary cobwebs.

Originally published as Personal privacy is a basic right, not a privilege