The Power of Our Teachers: Why the Classroom Is the Battleground for Fighting Totalitarianism

-- By AnaCarolinaVarela - 06 Mar 2015

The Problem

Privacy is very close to being a thing of the past. The right to be forgotten is no longer a viable option for most Americans. Our cell phones are being used to spy on us, the attempts made at encryption are being derailed, and young people are being conditioned to live without privacy by their parents and teachers. All of this, however, has failed to produce any action on the part of those in power, or those to whom the listeners are listening.

Who is to blame?

The government has few incentives to scale back this program of data collection. The companies collecting this information are motivated by the monetization of data. Individuals are also loathe to give up any of the convenience or psychological rewards that free email and social networking bring (Cory Doctorow has gone so far as to describe Facebook as a Skinner Box that conditions us to give up more information in order to experience validation). This leaves only one subset of the population that is not receiving a direct benefit from Big Data: young people. Though this generation will be the most inextricably tied to the Net and technology, it will also be in the best position to redirect the course of tech. There are a number of ways that we might try to reach them: namely, through direct campaigning, through their parents, and through their teachers.

Young people have no incentive to demand privacy

I think, however, that marketing campaigns would ultimately fail if aimed at kids already using social media. As Emily Nussbaum explains, "Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not." It would appear that there is no longer much incentive to work toward privacy – since no one is going to respect your attempts to get it. Nussbaum points out that young people have developed a kind of survival mechanism. The constant audience has pushed them to, “adopt[] the skills that celebrities learn in order not to go crazy: enjoying the attention instead of fighting it—and doing their own publicity before somebody does it for them.”

That article seems to extoll the virtues of teens embracing their audience and publishing their stories online. The problem that article does not address, however, is what to do when the information we do not want online is suddenly up for grabs. Our precise geographic location, our private telephone conversations, our humiliations. Teens today are growing up in a world where they are taught not to expect privacy from their parents, teachers, or the government. Why should they care if they have privacy from their friends?

Who can fix it?

The pitfalls of spy-parenting

Understanding this, it becomes clear that the most effective way to impress the importance of privacy upon young people is to begin by teaching them what it means to have privacy at all. Parents, however, like governments, will collect and analyze information about their wards whenever possible – and it is always in the name of security. Parents, then, must learn to fight the urge to gather intelligence on their own young people and trust them. But parents of kids already accustomed to a lack of privacy are also parents who have created those conditions.

Teachers are in the best position to help

So is the answer in education? Are teachers in the best position to make young people understand the implications of a life lived on the Net? Absolutely. First, the major problem with actually producing a secure environment is that the majority of users don’t know how to use the technology that keeps them safe. For example, in one 1999 analysis of the usability of PGP, two computer scientists concluded “PGP 5.0 is not usable enough to provide effective security for most computer users, despite its attractive graphical user interface . . . .” Twelve years later, this study was cited for the proposition that PGP remains “a hassle.” That same article concluded with the line, “[T]he glory of Google or Facebook, after all, is that anyone can use them without really knowing how they work.”

The problem of usability could be solved by teaching kids how the technology they use works. Much as grammar and mathematics are central features of any curriculum, so should how technology works be a key part of what our young people learn. If they understand the power Google has, maybe they’ll be more careful in how they use its applications and, when they eventually become employees of companies like it, maybe they’ll be more responsible in how they wield that power. If people understand how computers work, then it will be that much more difficult for companies to produce computers that can “betray their owners.” Finally, if the learning is not imposed but sought out, it’ll stick.

The second issue with realizing a safer society is a lack of understanding about the legality of data collection. If young people grow up learning that the vulnerabilities created by long-term use of the FitBit and Samsung Smart TVs’ recording of the most fundamentally personal aspects of our can be detrimental – as well as prevented – they may take action. Realizing that the current state of affairs is not inevitable may change their willingness to accept the status quo, but they will also need the tools to combat it. Here, we cannot understate the importance of educating young people about their basic freedoms. Not only should they understand their basic First, Fourth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights against the state, but they should also understand how past generations have lost and regained those rights. A combination of historical, legal, and technological learning is the solution to ensuring that children are prepared for a future as leaders in an increasingly interconnected, technological environment.

I don't think that teaching people constitutional amendment concepts will be of much use until it is too late. And it's hard for children to learn about privacy because adults don't allow them any.

What is happening is happening. That humanity is changing within two generations into a networked organism of social animals leaving commensally with machine intelligence cannot be reversed. The trajectory can be deflected, to leave technical room for the survival of certain humane values, of which privacy is one, that the most privileged part of the human race has been evolving and enjoying for the last few centuries of humanity's millions of years. Or not. By the time you have taught this condition to one more generation of children, the process will be over one way or the other. I think we can worry less about their children, but we must worry much more about you.