now it’s personal

When I started this weblog it was never intended to be one of those “I-spill-my-guts-with-woe-is-me-tales-of-depression-ennui-or-frustration” blogs, or one of those “aren’t-my-friends-and-my-life-so-endlessly-fascinating,-creative-and-clever” affairs, or detail the minutest details of my life for the whole world to see. In short it was never intended to be self-absorbed or particularly personal. As an ‘appendix’ to my main website it was to be a space where I expand on ideas and observations directly or tangentially related to mine and other peoples work, exhibitions, critical theory, etc. Of course there is bound to be a large amount of ‘personal’ opinion and information as a result of this, but this has not been ‘about me’ as such.

Until now.

Recently I had cause to query the amount of journeys debited from my Oyster card. This card is the way we pay for our public transport in London. Through a pervasive campaign and persuasive pricing (it is the cheapest way to get around for anyone who travels by bus or underground on a regular basis) Transport for London has made it all but impossible not to use one of these things. The way it works is that you add cash credit to your card, which is then deducted from your account when you get on the bus or at the ticket barrier of the tube station by some magical technology as the card is swiped over a reader. I was convinced that my credit was going down faster than I was using it and discovered that I could request a statement from TfL. I received my statement and within minutes realised that I hadn’t been ripped-off as I’d suspected, but I also realised that there was a record of all my journeys on public transport. In the case of the bus journeys the date, time of boarding and bus number. The tube journeys are even more detailed as with the tube one swipes when entering and exiting the ticket barrier. As the statement has my address on it, it would be reasonably easy to compile a fairly detailed record of my movements from my Oyster statement alone, and as a result get to know quite a bit about me. I think knowing quotidian details about the bus and trains and patterns of journeys that someone takes is getting to know quite a bit about them, personally. It’s certainly the sort of information that marketing companies and government agencies might find useful.

So here with the address and card number removed to avoid complete disclosure, is the most personal information I have posted so far on this weblog.

There has been speculation about the potential for the misuse of this information and, given that there are now plans to extend the capabilities of the Oyster card to paying for small inexpensive items which in the past may have demanded small change, in this most recent version of the vision of a cashless society the Oyster statement could contain an even more detailed record of the holder’s day to day activities. Obviously this is not that much of a revelation of a new tendency, bank account and credit card statements already provide accurate details about purchases, mobile phone records potentially track not only who and when you call, but also from where; so with access to the range of information about an individual, it would be fairly easy to build up a reasonably accurate and comprehensive profile of their activities, movements, the details of their lives. If they also keep a gut-spilling weblog it’s not unreasonable to speculate that it might be possible to get to know someone better than they know themselves (looking down my Oyster card statement I certainly don’t remember each of those individual journeys, but I must have taken them) and not just the mundanities of public transport and spending habits.

Some people regularly get concerned about encroachments on privacy and the rights of the individual and the pervasiveness of the virtual panopticon of the industrial military complex, while marketing companies and government agencies might equally point out that personal information is protected by law and data mining is illegal. Of course it isn’t that paranoid or an indulgence in fanciful conspiracy theories to point out that it doesn’t take much to legally or otherwise extract this personal information residing on various databases, and I’m sure these systems are less secure than they might claim. And it’s an inevitability that there will be an increase in such information gathering, at least until data overload results in network entropy and the whole thing comes crashing down. And as governments of allies in the US/UK paranoid alliance over terrorism strengthen resolve, one can more or less assume that opinions and statements made in public fora can potentially be scrutinised for subversive or inciting statements and one might just find oneself detained indefinitely without charge or trial at a government holding facility. This is just the bare facts about how the governments might, and do, operate these days.

What might be more shocking about the current ‘intelligence’ networks is not the incursions into an individual’s private information, but the incompetence in not being able to use intelligence intelligently, to avoid making stupid and dangerous mistakes, like, let’s say, releasing thousands of criminals instead of deporting them and then not being able to trace them, or murdering innocent people at point blank range on a tube train at Stockwell. Such levels of incompetence would be laughable if their consequences weren’t so consistently tragic, and the danger is not so much in what is known and accurately deduced about the individual by the industrial military complex, but what it is more likely to get wrong.