Remember George Radwanski, former Privacy Commissioner of Canada?
No, I am not asking you if you recall how he was disgraced by, wait, the Liberals who appointed him. I am not asking you either to recall how much he spent on his lunches, although I am pretty sure they're in the ranges of those spent by, say, Joe Volpe.
I would like to bring your attention instead to what he said on privacy when he was the Privacy Commissioner.
If we have to go through our lives thinking twice about everywhere we go, everything we do, every contact and every purchase because we have to ask ourselves how it might look when it's monitored, recorded, noted, analyzed, interpreted, perhaps misinterpreted, and used against us by agents of the state, we are not truly free.
I am sure you are all free, not like me living in a virtual solitary confinement. Therefore, it is pretty damn hard for you to understand what it is like to be watched every moment of the day (and night).
Remember, though, I have been living more or less like this for quite some time now. Coming back from Ottawa in June, I felt I was at a breaking point both physically and mentally. I not only desperately wanted to FEEL free, but also needed to do so, even though I knew I was not free.
Specifically, I knew that my borrowing records from various libraries were not private. Not wanting to be bothered, I chose to ignore the nuts-cracking by some of you until I realized that a mistake was made on September 3.
Ordinarily it would not be a big deal when someone borrows a wrong video/DVD. Writing about this mistake thus makes me feel wired, like I am confessing a crime. And it is still possible that I could be criticized of being paranoid. In fact, I have been hesitating and debating (thus stuck) for an agonizing while about whether I should blog about it.
I indeed wrote a draft about it a few weeks ago:
Apropos of nothing…
Have you ever picked up a video/DVD from the library (or Blockbuster's) and found out that it was not exactly what you were expecting ONLY after you (or someone else) popped it into the video/DVD machine?
…..
Now that we are on this subject, perhaps I should ask you some questions:
- If you were to draw some kind of conclusions, or any kind of conclusions for that matter, shouldn't you ask yourself whether it is possible to do so just by analyzing borrowing records?
- If it was possible, shouldn't you then make sure you have my complete records? And shouldn't you want to know which items I reviewed perhaps several times and which items I simply did not finish watching?
- Now let's suppose you do have my complete borrowing records (although I very much doubt it because it is to the data provider's advantage to spin my information), shouldn't you want to know why I chose each item? (Mind you, don't think too hard because I pick up a lot of them fairly randomly.)
I could go on with all those possibilities. The point is that there is no "intelligent design" in my borrowing records. There is no hidden message either, except for the only time that I sent you a message through my borrowing record on September 10 when I tried to tell you what I had intended to borrow the previous week. And I soon realized that was a real mistake and I stopped borrowing videos/DVDs altogether.
Why am I writing this? Why am I writing this? – I feel like a fool.
The point is, if you want to know what my view is on anything, simply interview me. Given how desperate I am to get my story out, the chance is very good that you will have your questions answered.
