After listening to Alexander Finger's presentation, entitled "Civil Rights 2.0 and what European Governments do to fight them" this morning, I had the feeling that the only way to preserve my privacy would be to withdraw completely from civilization and lock myself in a cave. His perspective on the way technologies can be used to collect information on us and our daily routines should be enough to raise the hair on the head of any citizen. Instead, not only does there seem to be no public debates on many practices of data collection and retention by authorities, but a large number of people seems to feel that it a lesser evil to preserve the physical safety of honorable citizen. I was already aware of the "big brother" issue, but I must say that the examples offered by Alexander Finger make it appear in a much more concrete light.

- A few years ago, an east-german journalist decided to run an inquiry on a child pornography website that was hosted on a server located in Philipines. He thus paid with his credit card to have a full access to the website and then went to the prosecutor to ask him to launch an investigation about the owners and "customers" of this website. The problem is that he was confronted with a crime, but no physical and identifiable suspects. The judge then asked the credit institutions to turn in informations about all the German cards holders who had performed online transactions of a certain amount during a specific time span. In the process, not only did the judge asked the banks to produce suspects, when one usually looks for suspects, but made hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, potential criminals.

- Alexander Finger also pointed out that the European Union has implemented laws which make it possible to trace the use of any mobile phones, the number contacted and the location of the phone at the time of the call. This means that your daily routine, as materialized by your movements in and out of your house, can be monitored by tracking the position of your mobile phone.

These last few years, all these official infringements on our privacy have been justified in the name of the fight against child pornography and lately, terrorism. Although both are very real issues, there are still much less chance for you to be a victim of a terror attack or of a pedophile than of dying from cardio-vascular conditions or a road accident.

There are several socio-technological trends that can be identified to understand the lack of any strong popular reaction towards the increasingly omni-present big brother. In the case of Germany, he sees two factors. The first one is a generational one, as the politicians voting for this kind of measure are far from being techies, many of them not even knowing what a browser is. Actually, it isn't only them. Lots of people don't know this term either. When you ask them how they go on the Internet, they say they use "Google". Basically, for many of them Internet = Google. The second is a matter of historical amnesia. Although Germany has lived through the totalitarian nazi system and then East Germans, under the socialist omnipresent state, they seem to have forgotten the cost of such infringement into their privacy. It seems to me that what could trigger such amnesia is the fact that our recent modernity has brought with it a promise of 100% safety or 0% tolerance for anything that could disturb the running of our societies. This state of mind is even more exacerbated when it comes to protect ourselves from blind terrorism or our kids from child pornography.

When it comes to data retention under very vague legal terms and for an unspecified amount of time, it seems that lack of reaction from a large majority of people, is their ignorance of what "deleting" data means. When authorities say that they will delete on a daily basis such private data as the car immatriculation number that are recorded by cameras on all German highways to make sure all the trucks pay their fees at station tolls, they don't specify whether these are actually deleted beyond any possibilities of ressucitation. Basically, it is a fact that deleted a file from the hard drive doesn't make it disappear for good. With the present computer know-how, it is apparently even possible to retrieve informations from severely damaged hard-disk. In a way, lots of people decide to simply blindly trust their democratically elected authorities.

However, despite the seemingly hopless behavior of many people in the face of the threat represented by this growing surveillance of our daily lives, I don't believe that this is an inevitable fate. There is definitely space for educating people about technologies and what they involve. In my opinion, one should start with both the younger generations, who have a tendency to willingly expose the most intimate moments of their life on MySpace, and the older generations who have more or less integrated new information and communication technologies in their professional and family lives. If they become aware of the amazing "memory" or "souvenir" capacity of the digital machines that surround us more and more, they might actually think twice before trusting all their datas to anonymous public or private administrations. These campaigns should be built not just on the potential threats or advantages that are nested in technologies but also on a careful observation of the way people use them and relate to them.

In this way, some of us might feel less like becoming a disconnected hermit. Although, I still feel that one should definitely take some time off-line, completely. That is, turning all electric stuff off and enjoy the sunrise!