Can anyone save what's left of privacy? -- May 9, 2019 column

By MARSHA MERCER

First came the email saying my credit card may have been compromised “at an undisclosed merchant,” and the bank was sending a replacement card.

Wait, what happened? And what’s an undisclosed merchant, anyway? When I called to find out, the customer representative said the bank doesn’t share that information.

The bank says it gets information from various outside sources – such as Visa, MasterCard and American Express and law enforcement agencies – and details about a specific breach are not disclosed, even to the bank.

That’s good, I guess, but it leaves customers in the dark.

My new card arrived promptly, and I started updating accounts where my credit card is on file for payments. That’s a downside of convenience and reward points.

We’ve all been there. No matter how hard we try to preserve a semblance of control over our personal data, we constantly lag enterprising crooks.

What we don’t willingly share on social media, companies “harvest” for their own business purposes. That word, harvest, grates on me, but, like it or not, our personal information is a commodity.

In our hyper-connected age, privacy is melting faster than glaciers on our warming planet.

Now, Congress -- after years of railing about the loss of privacy -- is holding hearings on the issue and fussing at corporate leaders. But lawmakers are divided on how to write a federal privacy law to replace our confusing patchwork of state and federal laws.  

The Federal Trade Commission is cracking down somewhat on Facebook and other mega companies that shirk their responsibilities.

Even social media and tech giants claim they’re on our side and promise – again – to do more to protect our privacy.

“The future is private,” Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg declared April 30, insisting he was serious.  

Facebook is negotiating with the Federal Trade Commission a fine up to $5 billion  in a settlement for failing to abide by a 2011 consent decree to protect users’ privacy.

Facebook shared the personal information of about 87 million users -- without their knowledge or consent – with Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm that has since gone out of business. 

The fine, expected any day, would be the largest in American history, and may require the company to take such steps as appointing a top level privacy official and a privacy oversight committee.

It’s just a slap on the wrist, critics say.

Two senators, Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Republican Josh Hawley of Missouri, say the enormous fine is a “bargain for Facebook.” They suggest the FTC hold Zuckerberg and other corporate leaders personally responsible.

Facebook is redesigning and updating its services to encourage private messages, communication within groups and Story. Stories disappear 24 hours after they’re posted.

Other companies now use privacy as a selling point, following Apple’s lead.

“We believe privacy is a fundamental human right,” Apple’s website says.

But it doesn’t come cheap. Apple’s budget iPhone XR starts at $749.

Google chief executive Sundar Pichai wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times Tuesday: “Privacy cannot be a luxury good offered only to people who can afford to buy premium products and services.”

Google unveiled a $399 smartphone and promised tools to help customers control their data, such as expanding incognito mode, which allows users to search without being identified, to maps and other apps. 

Our smart products already record and send back our conversations and activities – often to train artificial intelligence, but still. Amazon workers and contractors reportedly listen to consumers’ conversations with Alexa. That’s creepy.

And, Amazon’s Key will deliver your online purchases inside your home, car or garage.

All Prime members need do is allow access to their property. A promotional video shows happy people opening their car trunk, garage and front door and finding packages safe and sound. What could go wrong?

In this fast-changing world, we can’t expect the government to save our privacy. And we can’t trust the big tech companies to have our privacy at heart.

We each must decide how much we want smart machines to do for us and how much privacy we’re willing to give up for the convenience.

©2019 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Who's driving now? Ooops, we're still human -- June 11, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

I learned as a rookie newspaper reporter that there are no accidents in life – none involving cars, trucks or motorcycles, anyway.  

“Accident” implies an event that’s beyond our control. Because reporters cannot know what’s in a driver’s mind, we can’t say something is an accident.

Newspapers that shunned the A word reported on automotive mishaps, incidents and collisions. Blow-dried TV announcers and traffic reporters shouting over helicopter noise favored the more vivid noun crash. 

Copy editors weren’t the only sticklers for the right word to describe highway misfortune. Years ago, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration tried to expunge the concept of traffic accidents.

By eliminating the word in speeches, news releases and publications, it hoped in 1997 to re-educate people that car wrecks weren’t acts of God but predictable and preventable events.

The agency also launched a “Crashes are not accidents” campaign. From time to time, other groups have taken up the cause, but people hang onto the idea of tragic highway accidents. Now, though, while we can’t stop the lethal combination of speed and distance, we at least buckle our seat belts.

Technology is making cars safer. Backup cameras help you park and avoid pedestrians. Lasers or radar in adaptive cruise control keep your car a safe distance from the one ahead and warn if you veer out of your lane.

But what happens when technology – and not a human -- controls the car?    

This summer, Google will test the prototype of its fully self-driving car on city streets in Mountain View, Calif. The cautious two-seater won’t exceed the grand speed of 25 mph. Other companies working on driverless cars include General Motors, Tesla, Mercedes-Benz and the Chinese Web company Baidu.   

States are eager to get on board. Michigan, Florida, Nevada and Washington, D.C., have passed laws allowing automakers to test driverless cars. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe in March proclaimed the commonwealth “open for business” for the testing and deployment of autonomous vehicles.

In Northern Virginia, 70 miles of busy highways – parts of Interstates 66, 95 and 495 and U.S. Routes 29 and 50 -- could be used to test self-driving cars within a year, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported June 1.

  

The potential for safer highway travel has instant appeal. Autonomous vehicles don’t drive drunk or send texts or take selfies behind the wheel. But they do have to deal with humans in other cars.

Since Google began testing self-driving cars in 2009, the vehicles have logged nearly 2 million miles with a dozen minor accidents – but “Not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident,” the company announced. Other motorists rear-ended or sideswiped the autonomous car, or the car was in manual mode and its human driver at fault. 

The cars don’t have to be perfect; they just have to beat humans at driving, developers say. But that seems a low bar. Humans are terrible drivers.

In 2010, there were 33,000 traffic deaths, nearly 4 million injuries and 24 million vehicles damaged in motor vehicle crashes in the United States, the highway traffic safety administration reported last month. It still avoids the word accident.

Meanwhile, states are struggling with new rules of the road. California allows self-driving cars on public roads but requires a steering wheel, brake pedal and accelerator – and a trained safety driver who can take over in case there’s a problem.

That may lead to a false sense of security. Google in the fall of 2012 started letting its employees take home self-driving Lexus SUVs. The employees promised to be ever-alert and take the wheel as necessary. It didn’t work out.  

“We discovered something we really hadn’t seen coming but was obvious in retrospect,” Astro Teller, the improbably named director of Google’s Project X, the division that explores innovative products,  said last month in a South by Southwest talk.  

“Once people trust the system, they trust it. Our success was itself a failure,” he said. “The assumption that people can be a reliable backup for the system was a total fallacy.”

The only way a driverless car will work, Google decided, is to make it totally driverless. No steering wheel, no brake pedal, no accelerator. The car must drive itself from Point A to Point B at the push of a button.

“That has been a lot more work than we thought, but it’s the right thing to do,” Teller said.

Google’s decision to adjust the technology to fit the human – rather than expecting the human to adjust to the technology -- is a good lesson for us all. Experiment, yes, and take the time for safety. Crashes are not accidents. 

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.