Alicia suddenly faints in the middle of a busy street in an overcrowded metropolis somewhere in the world, in the middle of a crowd. Her bracelet detects the sudden fall and sends a message to the nearest emergency unit along with her identification record.
The emergency unit receives the notice, and sets out for the necessary help. Along the way, with the identification record, the emergency unit accesses Alicia's medical information, and obtains previous illnesses, general basic indicators, allergies to medications, etc. At the same time, collects the position of the medical parameters of her current location that the wrist device keeps sending.
Upon arriving at the scene of the event, the paramedic has the necessary instruments for the exact first aid care that Alicia requires, as well as as well as a clear idea of what to focus on. It performs a quick fingerprint scanner together with facial recognition, which confirms the identity and proceeds to carry out the planned procedures to promptly take it to the best option of care center indicated by the system, due to the urgency of the case, its nature, distance, traffic and availability of care.
Thanks to the fact that her information was available to be accessed by the different participating instances, Alicia was attended to quickly and accurately.
We are living in a moment in which a turning point is occurring as far as the concept of privacy is concerned.
But first, let’s review definitions in search of a starting point.
According to the OED, privacy is defined as:
The state or condition of being alone, undisturbed, or free from public attention, as a matter of choice or right; seclusion; freedom from….
And private :
Restricted to or for the use or enjoyment of one particular person or group of people; not open to the public.
As expected, the academic definitions do not help much and it is necessary to delve into other speculations.
Not so long ago, I heard Kade Crockford, Director of the ACLU of Massachusetts’ Technology for Liberty Program, refer to privacy as a matter of control. And, although she, as an activist and advocate, was referring to the loss of privacy through facial recognition, as a tool of control of one group over another to dominate it, giving a little twist to the approach, it seems to me that indeed privacy is very much about control, but more than between rival groups, it is about control and the decisions I have to make about myself, about how, with whom and for what purpose I reveal aspects of myself to a third party. At least, so far.
Privacy, as a concept and as a practice, is evolving. It always has, only now we are forced to change and we notice it more.
Athur Clarke and Stephen Baxter, touch on this theme in part of their novel «The Light of Other Days» in which a new technology completely eliminates privacy and humanity must adapt to this. The concept of intimate or private disappears as we know it, yet human activity continues to take this turning point as an opportunity to evolve as a race.
It is similar to what is happening today with the massification of the Internet and the avalanche of information caused by social networks. Currently in practice our activity is somehow captured and stored in the cloud being virtually impossible to avoid or put locks.
Our resistance to change makes us desperately look for ways to keep our data from being visible to those we don’t want, yet contradictorily we want it to be permanently available to us and our «allies».
Why? So that they are not misused, we say. But… what do we mean by misuse?
Let’s go back to Kade Crockford and his approach that privacy is not about hiding information, it’s about control.
Okay, good point and food for thought. We want to be in control of our own information so that it is available to whomever we want or it suits us at any given time. That would be fine.
But, let’s take a case. I’m walking down a dark street and, as usual (or should be), I don’t have any geolocation device activated… for safety, I think. Suddenly, however, a criminal comes out, points a gun at me and asks me to go to an ATM to withdraw money and rob me. Do I have time to activate the geolocation, or do I ask my assailant for permission? And once activated, how do I send this signal to the police or to someone who can help me?
So, we can think about always having it activated. Now everyone can know where I am at every moment…. also criminals (oh no!). It’s kind of a dead end street.
Well, we thought decided then, we’ll give an «Artificial Intelligence» the decision to identify when I’m in danger and give notice. Perfect, but am I not then delegating control to this technology and according to the definition of privacy = control, am I losing privacy?
We can also position ourselves on the assumption that if everyone always knows where I am, «the good guys» will always know and that will deter «the bad guys», therefore if we eliminate control (premise of the book) and everything will balance itself out.
Everything can happen, and we can imagine whatever we want, we will always have a blind spot that we will not be able to solve because we are prejudiced with keeping the concepts as we have handled them until today and we rarely open ourselves to think towards the future in an evolutionary way, and even when we believe that we do, it is in a limited way. The only certainty is that changes, in this case technological, make us lose control of our own information, and the issue is to know where this is moving and what is the new way to have control, before deciding not to have it.
It is a complex issue, but my intention beyond offering some magic answer, is to indicate the need to get rid of the prejudice that we should keep the concept of privacy as we have been doing so far, and go one step forward evolving our preconceived (or preconceived) ideas and find new paradigms for this.
Possibly our data should still be private, but in public.
The debate is open.
Being CIO 
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