Privacy: Your past determines the future – 12/16/2023 – Marcelo Leite

Every intellectual should make every effort to read anything Elizabeth Kolbert recommends. Even more so if she claims that a work is the result of deep research and turns out to be completely fun and completely terrifying.

The bunch of adjectives and adverbs are on the cover of the book “The Hank Show”, by McKenzie Funk, right after Kolbert’s succinct description: “Hank Asher may be the most important person you’ve never heard of.”

The enigma continues in the subtitle: “How a housepainter, drug dealer and DEA informant built the machine that governs our lives.” But this column wouldn’t need mystery or fancy recommendation to pore over the volume, Mac, the author, being an old acquaintance.

From his pen came “Windfall”, about businesses that profit from the climate crisis. Translated in Brazil as “Caiu do Céu” (2016), it was recommended by me to the late publisher Três Estrelas. More conflict of interest: we were in the 2012 Knight-Wallace Fellowship class at the University of Michigan together.

Failing to nominate “The Hank Show”, due to this personal connection, would be a sin. The story narrated in the book is intriguing in several ways, and in fact helps to elucidate how we became consenting victims of the extinction of privacy.

Mac writes that the right to be forgotten is a fundamental right. Forget. This is no longer possible, in these times when public and private databases on individuals have become searchable by powerful algorithms, which collect and aggregate multiple data to create a complete profile of each person.

With these aggregators, companies, governments, scammers and politicians gained the power to predict each other’s future with a reasonable degree of confidence. How these people will vote, if they are more likely to get sick, default, commit crimes, consume child pornography or commit terrorist acts.

None of this would have emerged as it did without Hank Asher and his strange biography, which takes up the first 70% of the volume. Hyperactive and brilliant, he made his fortune in Florida with the aggressive tactics of his condominium painting company.

He bought a plane to travel to the Bahamas for fishing and nights out. Soon she jumped at the opportunity to use him to make money through drug smuggling. On the verge of being arrested, he accepted a deal as an informant for the DEA, the US anti-drug trafficking agency.

His next business, in the 1990s, focused on information. Surrounding himself with the right people, from programmers to former police officers, he began purchasing collections of vehicle records and credit bureaus to assemble them into queryable databases, selling personal information to anyone who wanted to buy.

The success was resounding, and large information conglomerates, such as NexisLexis, began to neutralize competition by acquiring their companies. After the contractual quarantine period passed, Asher opened new companies to make them hell, buying any collection of data he found in order to feed his powerful computer batteries.

For each person, their systems created a unique identification number, comparable to computer IPs. All the information he obtained – addresses, neighbors and associates, cars bought or sold and to whom, marriages and divorces, traffic tickets, etc. etc. – were marked with this code, facilitating the creation of virtual dossiers.

Asher died in January 2013, but his ideas and machines proliferated to engender the post-2011 era of supersurveillance. Today we feed the Cambridge Analytics of life by hand-delivering data to the Big Data caterva.

The past determines our future, what we can or cannot be, do and obtain, from the narrow perspective of informational probabilistics. Goodbye to oblivion.

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