From our perspective of the first decades of the 21st century we all agree that computers (and many other devices) pose a serious threat to our privacy. Our world is so interconnected by machines that by following our “digital” footprints, companies, governments and who knows who else can find all the information they want on practically anyone.
That wasn't the case in the 80s, to the point that even the co-founder of Apple Steve Jobs he gave bold interviews on ABC in which he reassured anxious Americans that no, the advent of computers would not pose any privacy problems. Steve Jobs Privacy Apple. Reread slowly. But what comes to your mind, fools.
The dialogue with the journalist Ted Koppel (it's on YouTube but I place it here) opens with a formidable cross-section of the period, even if all the 12 minutes of the video are really worth it.
The starting point is a computer problem in Cape Canaveral and continues with the list of all the revolutions that computers would have brought in 1981. Among the various "magnificent and progressive fortunes," to quote Leopardi, the problems that computers could have brought to privacy are mentioned several times.
Luckily Steve is there
Jobs is there to reassure everyone: computers will liberate humanity, freeing us to do more creative things. Computers, he says, “will be the bicycle of the 21st century” and will make our society physically and mentally healthier.
Koppel's question
“There is a widespread feeling among those who do not know how a computer works or what it can do for us. It's the fear of computers taking over our lives. Is it a real danger?” Koppel asks Jobs.
Jobs's answer
“Well, as you know, when many people see the product we make for the first time, they don't even think it's a computer. It weighs just 5 kilos (!), You can throw it from a window if things don't go well. Yet he thinks that technological revolution will bring us, making democratic things that are centralized today. It's like when the German workers who took the train could all buy a Volkswagen. "
Another guest of Koppel, the investigative journalist David Burnham, (today 86 years old), is more cautious and raises questions about the future of computers. He fears that they could constitute instruments of mass control, and end up spying on people's lives. It evokes scenarios from 40 years earlier, when the FBI in 1941 took a census of Americans of Japanese origin to intern them in detention camps. It evokes gloomy scenarios.
“The government has the ability to use computers to glean information about us, even things we don't think are knowable,” he insists Couple. "It is not dangerous?" repeats to Jobs.
“Well, I think the best protection against something like that is more awareness of computing tools,” Jobs responds. “And this awareness will increase. In the age of the personal computer it is an awareness that one in every hundreds of thousands of people has, and I believe that in the next 5 or 6 years it will reach one in 10 people, at least in the United States. Eventually everyone will have a PC."
Optimism, Gianni
“Knowing that more and more people will know about IT tools reassures me, because I know that centralized intelligence will have less effect on our lives.”
Jobs faithfully anticipated many aspects of the following years, but did he see privacy right?
Burnham also grasps aspects that only today are we clearly observing. And it is interesting how the enthusiastic and optimistic forecasts of Jobs, someone who promoted his products "against the dominant thought", did not fear that the spread of computers would give that "dominant thought" more
