A month after my family and I moved into our new home, we received a letter from the utility company. Our water usage had increased sharply, we were told, and we should check for leaks and various other problems. We chuckled at this – it was no surprise that my family of five used more water than the kindly widow we’d bought the house from.
Of course the utility company has every reason to know about my usage of utilities, and this program is a fine thing that probably saves a lot of water. But I always remembered that letter. It permanently changed my mental understanding of my relationship with my utility, which has vast numbers of customers, and surely (I believed) would not pay any attention to a random, reliable bill payer like me. After the letter came, I became a bit more self-conscious about my water usage. I had a bit more of a sense that I was being watched.
The letter was certainly generated by a computer. And I prefer the image of a dumb computer churning through water-consumption levels, looking for spikes, and mindlessly firing off a form letter, to the thought of some utility official personally reviewing my water consumption each month.
But what happens when we take that concept – the automated, mass monitoring of behavior – and dial it up 1000%? At what point, if any, should we start getting concerned? When if ever does automated monitoring by a computer constitute an invasion of privacy? And does it make sense to worry less about our privacy when we are monitored by machines than when we are monitored by more. . .
