So you reckon you control your fitness gadget? Soon it will have you so exhausted you’ll want to strap it to the cat.
Do you have one? A FitBitty, Jawboning, Garminy, FuelBandish sort of thing? A bracelet you wear to monitor your activity, not just because there isn’t enough room in your local prison or the spooks think you’re about to join Isis? Or do you, like me, do much the same, via an app on your phone? Millions do. I can’t really tell you why; it’s just a thing. Yesterday The Times reported on where this is all going. Companies, we learnt, are giving them to staff, so as to discourage sick days. Insurers, we also learnt, are equally keen, so as to adjust their premiums. And with all of this, I strongly feel, we are heading into a dark place.
My own pedometer app does strange things in dark places. Often when I wake in the morning and immediately reach for my phone — an act only recently considered so weird and obsessive that I once wrote a whole feature for Times2 about people who did it — the stepcounter will already be showing 20ish. How? Why? Do I sleepwalk, perhaps to the fridge, somnambulantly checking Twitter as I go? My wife would certainly believe this. My own theory, though, is that the phone goes on the prowl all by itself. Extending tiny, Samsung legs, and strutting around. As though it owned the place.
It’s a sign, this step-counting thing. It’s a sign that we’re losing. In The New Yorker last year, the writer David Sedaris wrote a fretful love story about his own health bracelet; about how it initially only made him want to be healthier, but within a few months had him staggering for nine hours a day around the lanes of West Sussex, ostensibly to pick up litter, but in truth just to make the numbers go up, up, up.
Next to that I’m a mild case, but the signs of dysfunction are certainly there. The notion of going for a run without the steps being counted . . . I mean, would it actually have happened? If a fat man jogs through a forest without a pedometer to see it, has any jog truly happened at all? Plus, I feel a powerful urge to cheat. Not to a mad degree — it’s not like I’d strap the thing to the cat — but certainly around the edges. So my phone thinks I’m jogging and doesn’t realise I’m on a bike? I’ll take that. Meaningful jiggling on an airport travelator. And if I could do it without making people panic, I’d definitely fancy a jog down the aisle of a plane. I could break records.
For now, though, all this is just about us and them. Our relationships with our gadgets may be masochistic and bizarre, but at least it’s consensual. Should we wish, should we snap, we retain the freedom to take them off, or turn them off, or in extreme cases put them in a bench vice and tighten it, while screaming and eating a burger.
How soon, though, will that freedom slip away? Last year, an employee of Amazon wore a pedometer as he padded around a warehouse on a ten-hour shift and realised he’d covered 11 miles fetching stuff from shelves. And while most people probably thought “shocking!” and “exploitation!” I bet that somebody, somewhere, with employees he suspects of walking rather less, was rubbing his hands.
With insurance, you can see how it will happen. They won’t make you wear one. They’ll just lower your premium if you do. The urge for fraud will be strong; professional services will spring up, with people wearing 30 of the things being paid for strolls, like those completely outof-control dog-walkers you see in parks these days, who always make me wonder if Hairy Maclary and his chums have branched out into kidnapping. If it doesn’t monitor your DNA, too. If it isn’t welded on.
A few months ago, recording Radio 4’s The News Quiz, the comedian Andrew Maxwell launched into a peerless rant about how horrifying it would be if any state agent demanded the sort of information we all, now, routinely, simply blurt out. Where are you? What are you doing? Who are your friends? Where do you work? Where did you work before that? Are you in a relationship? Is it serious? It’s complicated? How complicated? Take a picture of yourself! How many steps did you take yesterday? Answer me! Right now! WHAT ARE YOU HAVING FOR DINNER?
Sure, it’s funny now. There will be a pivot, though. A hinge. One day, oversharing will still be a weird, if ubiquitous thing to do, and the next, suddenly, you’ll be weird if you don’t. And by then, it’ll be too late. Maybe it’ll be a chip, not a bracelet. In the back of the neck. It’ll know how much you drink and smoke, and how much you eat, and when you last laughed or cried, or had a lusty thought, and who you were looking at when it happened. And it’ll tell your boss. And it won’t be imposed upon us, all this, because we’ll have invited it in. Like you have to with vampires. Happy jogging.
It was the work email addresses that baffled me. Who joins a website for adulterers and types their work email address into the registration form? Tens of thousands of people, it turns out, including those who really should know better. As security experts pored over the data hacked from Ashley Madison — a website that promises “discreet encounters” to those in committed relationships — they found that more than 15,000 of its users had signed up with US government or military emails. Yes, even people in the US navy, for whom an affair might break their ethics code and lead to dismissal, couldn’t be bothered to hide their tracks. How stupid, you might think. But here’s the rub: even the stealthier cheaters — those who created a one-off email address and used a fake name — might not have escaped the hack. All those with a paid Ashley Madison account will have entered their credit card details into the site. And thus they were busted.
This is usually the point at which an earnest young activist with a beard and a backpack pops up to warn us all about the risks of letting companies store so much of our data online. The Ashley Madison hack will be a watershed, we are told. At last we will wise up to how many tiny pieces of ourselves — all those dirty secrets and embarrassing photos and ill-advised late-night messages — we have strewn around the internet.
Except I can’t see that happening. Faced with a small chance of a catastrophic data breach versus the absolute certainty of missing out on a service that all our mates are using, we always pick the former. A friend once decided to read the terms and conditions on all the software he used instead of just clicking “Agree” like every other person. In one week he had to wade through 146,000 words of impenetrable legalese.
Other ways of protecting your online privacy are similarly time-consuming — and many of us feel intimidated by the level of computer knowledge required to use them. As a result, such services struggle to achieve the kind of mass audience that would force tech companies to rethink their practices. Take the example of Tor, a free tool that masks your web activity. It’s wildly popular in geek circles but has only 2.5m daily users worldwide, according to a recent report by the British government. By contrast Facebook, which is in effect a giant vacuum cleaner sucking your personal details from your fingertips while you look at pictures of your adorable baby nephew, has nearly a billion.
Those billion users are pretty much immune to warnings about their privacy, so Facebook suffers surprisingly little reputational damage from security scares. Earlier this month it cancelled an internship awarded to a Harvard student after he exposed a security flaw in its Messenger app. According to the company, Aran Khanna had been wrong to “scrape” Facebook data that allowed users to track their friends’ locations to the nearest yard. The company showed less angst about making that information publicly accessible in the first place.
The music streaming service Spotify was the subject of a brief outcry last week over terms and conditions asking for access to users’ photos and contacts. Daniel Ek, its chief executive, admitted that “we should have done a better job in communicating what these policies mean” but said access was needed to personalise the service.
That idea — we just want to give users an experience tailored to their preferences — is now the standard rationale for tech companies trying to get their hands on more of your data. In fairness, it is largely true, and we rarely notice it, believing it to be the natural order that Google knows we want the website of the Lamb and Flag down the road, not the one in Carlisle.
The unspoken corollary is that getting more personal details means companies can better target ads. And they are not the only ones desperate for our data. After the success of Barack Obama’s digital 2008 campaign, political parties are obsessed with coaxing your email address and phone number out of you so they can bombard you with campaign literature. Some Labour members have received more than 300 emails this summer about the leadership, deputy leadership and London mayoral candidates. That’s 300 paeans to Yvette Cooper and updates on Angela Eagle’s tour schedule. It’s enough to make anyone vote Tory.
Clearly our data is valuable. But, paradoxically, we don’t value it that highly. A 2013 study by the University of Chicago law school gave some participants a gift card worth $12 (£8) on which their purchases would be recorded or an anonymised one worth $10. Other participants were allowed to choose which card they took. All were then given the opportunity to swap their card. The researchers found that fewer than one person in 10 given the $12 card was willing to give up $2 in exchange for greater privacy. But they also discovered that people tended to keep whichever card they were initially given, showing the power of the default privacy setting. They concluded that consumer protection laws were needed to “protect people from their own suboptimal decisions” — that is, we are thoughtless and lazy and must be saved from ourselves.
Waiting for a full-scale backlash, even a widespread boycott, is a recipe for inaction. This is one area where we can’t expect consumer power to hold big companies to account. We don’t understand what we’re handing over and corporations are making it as hard as possible for us to find out. Navigating the privacy settings of the average social network would have stumped the codebreakers of Bletchley Park. That blasé attitude, born out of a crippling lack of knowledge, bleeds into our feelings about state surveillance, too. As the writer Jonathan Franzen tells this newspaper, there is a “culture of abject self-disclosure” online, so what the US National Security Agency or MI5 wants from us seems pallid in comparison. The comedian Stewart Lee calls Twitter a “Stasi for the Angry Birds generation”. The difference being, of course, that we give ourselves up.
Finally, the debates around online privacy also force us to confront our illogical attitude to danger. We are terrified by things that are largely unthreatening (weedy British spiders or clowns) and completely unmoved by the genuine perils in our lives. Stairs finish off hundreds of us every year. Cars are more dangerous than planes, yet people who need a fistful of tranquillisers even to consider air travel are perfectly happy to barrel down the M1. By contrast, the risk of losing control of our data online is all too real but we cannot stir ourselves to action.
That heady cocktail of laziness and poor risk assessment suggests the Ashley Madison hack will not stop the horny and wi-fi-enabled joining a similar website in future. A few people will get sacked, a few divorce lawyers will get rich, but the behaviour of the rest of us will twang back into its old groove like the snap of a cheap G-string.