While everyone is carrying on about the information super-highway, a quieter revolution is taking place in information technology which may have just as a profound influence on humans as social animals. This is the gathering together of information about people from dozens of different public sources and putting it on easily accessible CD-ROMs. In the 1960s we talked about the global village because of the telephone and air-transport. The gathering of personal information on CD-ROM makes the nation a village _ in the sense that the village is a hot bed of gossip and a marketplace. The amount of public information about individuals is astounding. In disparate form it is of no moment. Collected, it is valuable and perhaps dangerous.
A Melbourne company, Oracle Library Service, is already doing this and has 2.5 million Australians on its biographical list. Oracle keeps personal and credit information separate and does not give it out without permission. However, the computer technology is getting so good that there is nothing stopping other companies from building up databases of personal, public information. Some examples. Names in newspaper articles. Several major papers are on CD now anyway, so the collection is even easier. Royal commission reports are easily scanned in. Searching names in the book form is hopeless; searching for names in CD form is a breeze. Other include: professional body disciplinary proceedings, criminal and civil court reports, bankruptcies, ICAC, Queensland’s Criminal Justice Commission, the Australian Securities Commission companies database, Who’s Who (only available in book form) could easily be scanned in, electoral rolls, phone books, the Commonwealth and State Directories of the several thousand senior and middle-rank public servants, dictionaries of biography, authors from bibliographies, press releases, Vice-Regal notices. And so it goes on. As time goes on more information is stored electronically and searching capacity improves. It will not be long before huge range of people will have access to very detailed information about millions of Australians. Debt-collectors, marketers, politicians, journalists, lawyers, recruiting agencies, credit providers and police will be able to get information very quickly which previously required memory. “”Wasn’t he named adversely in the Stuart Royal Commission?” “”Didn’t he go bust a while ago?” It may not seem to matter much. So what if someone can access huge amounts of detail quickly? Indeed, there may be a bonus that the electronically archived material is more accurate than memory.
“”No, it says here he was only a witness in the Stuart Royal Commission.” More likely, however, a whole range of material will spring up which might cause people (especially credit and recruiting agencies) to make prejudicial or otherwise unfair conclusions. The trouble is that searchers will get hit today with a history of information and subconsciously treat it all as new and current. “”He went bankrupt and got fined for drunken and disorderly conduct.” But that was 20 years ago and he has since been a model of financial prudence and sobriety. Further, the information is likely to link family members. Who’s Who has lots of family information, for example. People can then get condemned for their siblings’ misdeeds. The gossip of the village linking people with events which used to be confined geographically and confined to human memory is now national and pervasive. We see the signs of it already. Political staff are notorious for dredging up information about people or things they said in an attempt to discredit their political opponents by guilt through association. Federally, we see the National Media Liaisons Service regularly digging through electronic databases (like Hansard) for things people say.
Now they will be able to click up a far greater array of information very easily. Some people might say I have nothing to hide. It does not bother me what anyone knows about me. The trouble with that view is that it may not matter what others know or think; but when they start acting with respect to employment, granting credit, deciding whether you should become a member of club, deciding whether you should get a government appointment or consultantcy and so on, there are grounds for worry. The information may be inaccurate, misleading or may not give the full picture. On the other hand, once this huge amount of information becomes accessible to all (through the wretched information highway) society will significantly change. The social hypocrisies of modern living will crumble as everyone becomes more aware of the foibles of the pasts of the high and mighty. Society may become more transparent.
People may be less taken in by the selective CV s of the high and mighty. On the marketing side, some may feel they will be harassed with targeted mail-outs and phone calls because the electronic profile indicates their likely predilection for certain goods and services. On the other hand, as marketing becomes more selective, people will be less likely to be bombarded with advertising junk they are not interested in.
As the computer technology gets smarter, cheaper and easier to use, it will become less controllable. The likelihood is that while privacy concerns will hold back some of the misuses of the new forms of information, developed societies are going to have to face the fact that huge numbers of people will have cheap access to vastly more information about other people than is presently the case. That is inevitably going to change the way we deal with each other. It may impose a deterrent against sleazy behaviour; it may give rise to a whole new category of sleazy behaviour in the form of abuses of information. Human nature suggest a bit of each.