DEMOS

It’s striking how frequently there are stories about the insecurity of our personal information. There’s a few more today – here’s one, predictably about Facebook. They usually revolve around the idea that we don’t realise our personal information is shared, stolen or abused by lots of people and organisations without our knowledge. I suspect most people probably are aware that it happens. But we’re less sure about exactly why, what the consequences are, why we should care, and what we should do about it.

The vagaries of identity theft warnings don’t particularly help us figure those things out. Even though we're all very concerned by privacy and what happens to our personal information – according to the very interesting Oxford Internet Survey report from this year, from the Oxford Internet Institute, 70% believe that going online puts the users privacy at risk – that doesn’t seem to impact on our behaviour too greatly.

Usually our readiness to offer our details is down to convenience. The ease of armchair shopping is quite a draw. For a start, no other shoppers can see me buying Genesis' Invisible Touch when I download it online. It feels a little less...guilty. And the fact that Sainsbury's can predict that I'd buy an aubergine this week based on their Nectar knowledge of my recent shopping habits might seem like a small cost for the extra special offers and discount points.

The problem of the security of our information is a pressing question, but it misses a big part of the story if we focus too narrowly on it. As part of our FYI and privacy work, we’ve been thinking about how the profiling and sorting that is the flip side of this convenience shapes our choices, behaviour and options. Security of information needs to also - in addition to worrying about criminal use of our information - be seen in that light: how profiling structures our experiences in a very fundamental way.

There’s already some great writing on this sort of surveillance thinking – I’ve been checking out a collection edited by David Lyons called ‘Surveillance as Social Sorting’, which is turning out to be a great read.  And Perri 6 and Ben Jupp's Demos report 'Divided by Information' is another great piece. Stay tuned for more of our work on personal information - do get in touch if you have any thoughts; we'd love to hear from you.