DEVIL in the details

ROBERT CROSS, THE OTTAWA CITIZEN

February 1, 2009

Last summer, the Laurentian Bank rejected a loan application for an all-terrain vehicle from a resident of the Kitigan Zibi First Nation, an Algonquin community near Maniwaki. The man had an impeccable credit history. The problem was where he lived.

Its policy is a classic example of social sorting, driven by surveillance processes that legally vacuum up information about us — including where we live — and use it to slot us into categories of risk or desirability that affect our life chances, for good or for ill.

Increasingly, social sorting defines the surveillance society. Governments and corporations draw on large databases of personal information compiled by commercial data brokers, credit reporting companies and others to define target markets and risky populations. “We’re being classified and rated, no question about it,” says Jeff Chester, of the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington.

Based on this information — sometimes referred to as “dataveillance” — we’re being slotted into categories such as Golden Empty Nesters, Burdened Optimists, White Van Culture and High-Rise Hardship, or being assigned “trust scores” that can determine how we’re treated.

Our classifiers examine our online and in-store purchasing behaviour, the websites we visit, geographic data, information we post on social networking sites, credit reports they gather from companies such as Equifax and TransUnion, and anything else they can get their hands on.

“Every minute little detail of information gets caught in an algorithmic way to paint a picture about you,” explains Valerie Steeves, a criminology professor at the University of Ottawa. “Judgments are made about you on the basis of that shadow, even though the shadow may or may not be accurate.”

All this takes place almost entirely out of sight. Few of us even realize it’s happening. Yet these hidden processes are having real effects on our lives.

Because of social sorting, people are being denied jobs and insurance, says Philippa Lawson, former director of the University of Ottawa’s Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic. “Their lives are being seriously affected by decisions based on this information, which didn’t used to be collected simply because we didn’t have the technology to do it.”

Few of us will ever realize we didn’t get an interview with a potential employer because they pulled up something unflattering — and quite possible inaccurate — about us from a commercial database, accessible by anyone for a fee. “It really is increasingly a Kafkaesque situation that we’re facing,” Ms. Lawson says.

And, says David Lyon, a Queen’s University sociologist and leading figure in the field of surveillance studies, this process of classification is increasingly automated, with a correspondingly smaller role for human judgment.

To some degree, bureacracies have always assigned us to categories, relying on stereotypes and the discretion of clerks for their classification. But computerized systems have altered both, Mr. Lyon says.

They have reduced discretion vastly, because they impose more rules and regulations on the process. That means, for example, asylumseekers are less likely to get a hearing at the border “because all these criteria have been settled in advance and the machine runs them first,” Mr. Lyon says.

And they have increased stereotyping, because the categories they sort us into are narrower and subtler, producing more sharply defined stereotypes.

Most often, “we don’t know the criteria on which we’re being assessed for our trustworthiness or our risk-proneness,” Mr. Lyon says. “I don’t believe we have recognized sufficiently just how far our own choices, life chances and opportunities to be involved in society in a regular way are being influenced by sets of surveillance processes that occur below the surface.”

Social sorting often works to the benefit of the affluent and educated. Many companies now rank customers by how much they spend on their products, for example, valuing most those who spend more. When preferred customers call for service, they are routed into shorter queues staffed by more skilled employees while the rest of us — the lesser valued — fume on hold. Some offer products to different customers at different prices, depending on how they have been categorized.

Sometimes, social sorting can have unexpected — even perverse — results. You might expect people coming out of bankruptcy to have trouble getting a credit card, Ms. Steeves says. “In fact, these people are being targeted precisely because they’re bad credit risks and have irresponsible credit histories. So you’ll make a lot more money in interest from those people.”

The fact that some people benefit from social sorting makes it hard for many to recognize the harm, Mr. Lyon admits. But it’s a different story for those sorted into less desirable categories, he says. For them, social sorting can amount to an automated form of discrimination, producing second-class citizenship. Since 9/11, it has generated crude profiling of some groups, including Muslims.

“From a human rights perspective,” says Ms. Steeves, “that’s a big problem. Once you label someone in that way, the strength of the label is going to determine behaviour on its own.”

Britain, for instance, maintains a database of potential criminals, compiled by tracking anti-social behaviour from school and social worker reports. The youngest person in it, says Ms. Steeves, is three years old. “Imagine his life chances!”

Because it may cause others to see us through an unflattering lens, social sorting can profoundly affect a person’s quality of life, says Teresa Scassa, the Canada Research Chair in information law at the University of Ottawa. “If you’re treated badly in every interaction you have, that has an impact on how you experience your life and how you feel about your citizenship within the society.”

And since it’s hard to break out of the box you’ve been assigned, social sorting widens existing divisions in society, says Kevin Haggerty, a surveillance expert at the University of Alberta. “The advantaged tend to be cumulatively advantaged.” For those who are disadvantaged, though, “those disadvantages tend to reinforce themselves, not because of anything they did, but because they were already disadvantaged.”

The more we use the surveillance systems, the more we’re likely to exacerbate those social divisions, Mr. Lyon says. “And we do so with clear consciences.”

Britain provides several examples of social sorting’s insidious impact. Online applicants for driver’s licences are first checked against various private and public databases. The purpose is to develop “trust scores” for applicants, which have little to do with their driving records. For example, those who deal regularly with banks and trust companies are rated more trustworthy than those who order a lot of goods from mail-order companies.

Similarly, people applying for housing benefits in Britain are assessed on a complex set of hierarchical criteria, the lowest of which is single parents in private landlord accommodation. Seniors on pension are rated most highly.

Those with lower ratings are much more likely to be scrutinized closely and have their files reviewed. “If you’re a fraudulent senior on a pension,” Mr. Lyon says, “you stand much more chance of pulling the wool over the eyes of the computerized system.”

Those categorizing us don’t even need to know our names. Knowing our postal code, landline location or IP address is often sufficient for those constructing our digital shadow.

“It’s not that they know all about you,” Mr. Lyon says. “It’s that they know all about everyone else in the same category as you. They’re creating categories into which you have to fall. Your life chances, your opportunities, your trustworthiness to organizations have already been assessed.”

Those who assert they have nothing to fear from surveillance because they have nothing to hide betray their “complete blindness” to social sorting, Mr. Lyon says. “It makes no difference that you have nothing to hide. A judgment has already been made about you, regardless of what you may or may not have to hide.”

You may have nothing to hide, adds Ian Kerr, Canada Research Chair in ethics, law and technology at the University of Ottawa, “but it still may not be true that you have nothing to fear. All sorts of presumptions can wind up being made from things that in isolation are perfectly innocent.”

“Nothing to hide, nothing to fear” suggests privacy is meant to protect only those with something to hide, Mr. Kerr points out. It implies we’ve abandoned the idea that we’re autonomous individuals with certain liberties. “You get 24/7 security all the time, because you don’t need privacy unless you’re a criminal with something to hide.”

Most importantly, the idea inverts the foundations of liberal democracy, Mr. Kerr argues. The Supreme Court has likened the Charter of Rights to an invisible fence that protects individuals from the state. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear “tries to say you don’t need the fence.”

Social sorting, and the surveillance that fuels it, raises fundamental questions about what it means to be a citizen, Mr. Lyon insists. “Do we want to live in a society that is meritocratic to the point of denying opportunities to people who, through no fault of their own, cannot attain the same kinds of opportunities?”

For a faultless resident of the Kitigan Zibi reserve, alas, that society already exists.