In exchange for giving up our personal data, we get to watch each other's cat videos, while Google becomes the new state

Of course Google doesn't want to pay its taxes to the British crown, like a loyal corporate subject. In Google's mind it secretly thinks that it is now something like a state, and we are all its subjects. It is we who should pay tribute to it – and we do.

We pay it a sort of information tax. Google is the Ministry of Information Retrieval. If you want some data, you have to give up some, about who you are, what you do, what your movements are. Like most other states, Google will then sell access to you to other interested parties.

Just like any state, Google has its spies. Its Street View cars snoop the world's high-value streets. All the better to help us citizens of Google-land do what we are supposed to do there – which is shop.

If Google succeeds in selling us its Google Glass, then we all become its agents. We would be a sensory apparatus for a vast computer database whose mission is to take our perceptions, thoughts, feelings or discoveries and turn them into money.

Some might be quite happy residing in Google-land. Google Books might be better than your local library. Google Maps makes up for all the missing street signs your council can't maintain. It is entirely possible that Google has better intelligence on world affairs than MI5 or the CIA, and its designs on what to do with it might be a bit less evil.

As with any state, there's another side. The British government at least notionally acts in the interests of its citizens. There is at least some transparency, some checks and balances. But in Google-land none of this applies. It acts in the interests only of its shareholders, and that perhaps only notionally. We are not really its citizens but its peons. We always owe a debt of information to Google, no matter how much of it we have already given up.

There used to be all sorts of criticisms of the old "culture industries" like Hollywood and the top 40, which entertained us with stories or songs that always ended on an upbeat note, no matter how false. But at least the culture industries went to the bother of entertaining us. Their replacements don't even bother. They expect us to entertain each other, and pay a tax for it. Facebook or Google's YouTube are not the culture industries so much as the vulture industries, taking an information surcharge from us while we amuse each other, and selling us to advertisers. Like do-it-yourself commercial TV.

These are all elements of what I call the "spectacle of disintegration". The old spectacle of television and radio papered the world with images of what the lovely soul of the commodity was supposed to look like. We were at least still free to daydream while we sat idly watching.

But in the spectacle of disintegration, all that breaks apart. The big screen decays into so many little screens. Our leisure time is now to be spent producing information for the vulture industries of Google and co, in an unequal exchange of information. In exchange for the poll tax of personal data, we get to watch each other's cat videos, while Google becomes some new version of the state, presiding over all our bitty lives, master of all our data, in aggregate.

Like any state, Google has its patriots. But there are also those who think this latest version of the spectacle offers some quirky avenues for having fun at its expense. Its time for a certain opacity, a certain glamour of obscurity. Not all the information we offer up has to be even remotely true.

It's 45 years since the failure of May '68, that last attempt to rock the old kind of state. Afterwards the Situationists, who gave us the concept of the spectacle, disbanded. But they did not go silent. They pioneered ways of discreetly carving out spaces where other codes apply, protected by cryptic passwords. Perhaps some of their subtle arts might work within the belly of this new digital beast, so that we might live within it, but not give it our undivided attention.

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Important questions about privacy and class have come from an artist's photos of unwitting New Yorkers in their apartments

Ask five people who have been in New York City for more than a decade what makes someone a "real" New Yorker and you'll get five different answers: if you're born here; seven years in the city; 10 years; when you're no longer fazed by celebrity sightings; when a bagel guy knows how you like your coffee and uses the perfect amount of cream cheese. My opinion? You become a real New Yorker around the third time you cry on the subway.

A city like New York blurs the line between public and private like almost nowhere else in the world. Our abodes are often so small, and our time outside of them so large, that much of what would be alarming on the streets of Peoria, Illinois is unremarkable here. I once saw a man defecate in a public park, and I didn't blink. If you live here long enough, you adjust and do things that in an earlier life you'd never consider, like slam your hand on the hood of a cab that almost hit you, body-check a slow-moving tourist, or stroll naked through your apartment – even though you know half a dozen units across the street can see into your windows.

Because we do so much in public, there are particular lines of privacy that simply aren't crossed. When someone is bawling their eyes out on the train, you look away. When you're in line for a morning bagel, you rarely start an extended chat with the person in front of you. And when you look across the way and see your neighbor walking around in her robe, you don't take a photo.

Except that's exactly what artist Arne Svenson did: He photographed his neighbors going about their apartments. Everything he photographed was visible from his own home, where he looked into the floor-to-ceiling windows of a luxury building across the street. No one in the photos is easily identifiable. And they're undeniably compelling, fascinating images.

But some of Svenson's neighbors are put off, feeling their privacy has been invaded. I'm not sure they're wrong.

"I don't feel it's a violation in a legal sense, but in a New York, personal sense there was a line crossed," Michelle Sylvester, a resident, told the AP.

"I think there's an understanding that when you live here with glass windows, there will be straying eyes but it feels different with someone who has a camera."

Though we may literally live stacked on top of one and other, making privacy an illusion, that facade of privacy keeps us sane. It's one thing to accept the fact that your neighbor might catch a glimpse of you getting ready for work; it's another to live understanding that you may be covertly photographed, and your image sold for thousands of dollars out of a Chelsea gallery.

And yet that is a truth about living in New York: you may be covertly photographed, and your image may be sold for thousands of dollars out of a gallery. That is also the power of Svenson's art: it challenges the artificial lines we draw around the public and the private, especially in a place where true privacy is a luxury. It also shines a light on the fact that for the many in this city who live in luxury, part of the appeal is in its display.

The very homes Svenson photographs offer only a transparent line between private abode and public display – they're showcase homes, with walls made of glass that are meant to let the casual observer see in as much as they allow the residents to see out. Their windows are frames for their interior; residents know people can see in, and furniture and art are positioned accordingly. The home is itself a piece of art, designed and owned by the person living in it. When Svenson shifts that ownership – complete with human being inside – to be his art, it's uncomfortable for the person who was previously creator of the space. Now they're just an object in a frame, like the chair they carefully selected for display.

That his photos depict the rich inside glass homes – designed to be envied – is partially why, I suspect, it's easier to see Svenson's photos as art rather than violations. That he used a telephoto lens makes the photographs more offensive, but he wasn't peering into anything that the residents were trying to hide – as noted, part of the appeal of the real estate he photographed is its exhibition architecture.

If Svenson had photographed into the small windows of a building of lower-income residents, the photographs would appear more exploitative and voyeuristic than transgressive. At the same time, there's something discomforting about saying that a private citizen should have fewer windows and higher walls, or be more guarded with their actions at home, if they don't want to be the subject of a stranger's art. That's a tall order no matter where you live.

The privacy issues raised by these photographs are perhaps easier to assess than in other circumstances, since Svenson's art is just that – art. But these photos raise the question of how we might react if the photography weren't for artistic expression (and artistic profit) but for personal gratification, or for more crass, commercial ends. There's a line between what Svenson has done and the paparazzi selling celebrity photos to tabloids, for instance, or predators to porn websites.

While a photo of a woman bent over wearing a robe is art in Svenson's renderings, add a few more inches of skin and it could easily be erotica or pornography in another's. Is the violation worse if the image is intended to sexually titillate? Is it better if the photos never see the light of day but are used for personal enjoyment by a peeping tom? Or is the violation in the photo-taking itself?

New technologies and residential patterns continue to shift our privacy norms, and our laws with them. As a general rule, we don't find it particularly odious to photograph people in public – take the iconic V-J Day kiss in Times Square photo. But taking a photo up a woman's skirt, even if she's wearing that skirt in a public place, typically elicits rightful condemnation. We draw a line around spaces where we feel there's a reasonable expectation of privacy – whether inside our homes or the private parts of our bodies.

Svenson's art challenges that distinction, and it does so in a city where the public/private divide is already incredibly blurry. It's uncomfortable art. It relies on methods that many people believe should be illegal. It puts pressure on our assumptions about privacy, our biases about class, and the lives that invite peering versus those we simply peer into.

It's very good art.

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The Daily Mail carries a front page picture today of Boris Johnson, London's mayor, with a caption-headline saying: "Boris and the lovechild he now can't keep secret."

Inside is a full-page article explaining why the judges agreed that the secret should be revealed. Here's the intro:

"The public does have a right to know about Boris Johnson's philandering past, the appeal court confirmed.

That succinct sentence is a true reflection of the judgment, which supported the original ruling by a high court judge, Mrs Justice Nicola Davies, that the Mail was justified in publishing stories about Johnson's illegitimate child because his extramarital affairs called into question his fitness for public office.

Indeed, the Master of the Rolls, Lord Justice Dyson, was so convinced by this argument that he repeated it in the concluding paragraph of his judgment. He said:

"It is not in dispute that the legitimate public interest in the father's character is an important factor to be weighed in the balance against the claimant's expectation of privacy.

The core information in this story, namely that the father had an adulterous affair with the mother, deceiving both his wife and the mother's partner and that the claimant, born about nine months later, was likely to be the father's child, was a public interest matter which the electorate was entitled to know when considering his fitness for high public office."

The two judges sitting with him agreed. So we now know that Johnson's affair with an art consultant, Helen Macintyre, resulted in the birth of a girl named Stephanie in November 2009. (Well, we knew it long ago, but this judgment confirms that the paper is legally ok to publish the fact).

At the original trial, the Mail's publishers, Associated Newspapers, were ordered to pay £15,000 for publishing photographs of Stephanie, thereby breaching her privacy.

But the child's legal backers were required to pay 80% of the Mail's legal costs, which were estimated at £200,000.

Macintyre's side appealed against the decision not to award her damages because the Mail published details of her affair with Johnson and about the birth of their child. It is that appeal the court rejected.

Given the fact that four experienced judges have unequivocally supported the paper's public interest justification for running its story, it would be odd for any journalist to question the merits of their argument. I certainly don't intend to do so.

What strikes me about the case is that it tends to prove that politicians of a certain stripe and character can rise above the embarrassment, as did two past Tory philanders, Alan Clark and Steven Norris.

So it probably won't matter at all to Johnson's future electoral chances - whenever and wherever he stands - because his philandering appears not to bother people over much.

The Mail may well feel that it should have an impact on voters' decision-making and, doubtless, should the Tories dare to elect Johnson as party leader (and potential prime minister) the paper would warn their readers to beware of Boris.

That scenario is so full of journalistically sexy possibilities, one can hardly wait.

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Senior judges dismiss Helen Macintyre's attempt to hide paternity of child born after brief affair with mayor of London

The public has a right to know that Boris Johnson had an extramarital affair with a woman who later gave birth to their daughter, the appeal court has ruled.

Three senior judges decided on Monday that voters were entitled to be told that the mayor of London conducted a "brief adulterous affair" with the woman who later gave birth to their daughter, now aged three.

The mother is Helen Macintyre, a professional art consultant, who lost her legal battle to keep secret the paternity of her daughter, who is named only as "AAA" in public court documents.

Johnson's fatherhood of Macintyre's daughter was first revealed by the Daily Mail in July 2010, but has since been the subject of an anonymous legal battle at the high court.

In a ruling that could redraw the privacy rights of public figures in England and Wales, the court of appeal said: "It is not in dispute that the legitimate public interest in the father's character is an important factor to be weighed in the balance against the claimant's expectation of privacy.

"The core information in this story, namely that the father had an adulterous affair with the mother, deceiving both his wife and the mother's partner and that the claimant, born about nine months later, was likely to be the father's child, was a public interest matter which the electorate was entitled to know when considering his fitness for high public office."

The ruling came after a drawn-out privacy fight between Associated Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mail, and Macintyre.

The court of appeal rejected Macintyre's bid for a privacy injunction against the newspaper, ruling that she had previously shown an "ambivalent approach to the confidentiality" of Johnson's paternity of their daughter. The judges also upheld major parts of an earlier high court ruling that referred to the politician as "philandering".

In a private six-day hearing at the high court last year, Macintyre said her daughter's paternity was "exceptionally sensitive and delicate" and that it would be "absolutely devastating" for the three-year-old to learn of her paternity in the national press.

However, it emerged that she had hinted at Johnson's identity to Nicholas Coleridge, the president of the major magazine publisher Condé Nast, in a conversation at a private house party in June 2010.

In September that year, she agreed to be interviewed by Tatler and take part in a photoshoot with the child. According to the court judgment, the mother went ahead with the interview despite receiving legal advice from her solicitor that it would be unhelpful to her privacy claims.

The three appeal court judges said: "The mother seems to have had little concern as to the effect of the magazine article on the claimant [her daughter]."

Macintyre's daughter is alleged to be the second child conceived by Johnson as a result of extramarital affairs, the court heard during hearings last year. Lawyers for the Daily Mail argued that it was in the public interest to name Johnson as the child's father because it "went to the issue of recklessness and whether on that account he was fit for public office".

Referring to an earlier high court ruling, the three appeal court judges said: "It was not material to the judge's conclusion whether contraceptive precautions were taken. What was material was that the father's infidelities resulted in the conception of children on two occasions.

"The judge was entitled to hold that this was of itself reckless behaviour, regardless of whether any contraceptive precautions were taken."

Johnson also appointed Macintyre to an unpaid public position as a fundraiser in the early stages of her pregnancy. However, this point played only a modest role in the court's judgment.

Rejecting the application for a gagging order, the master of the rolls, sitting with Lord Justice Tomlinson and Lord Justice Ryder, said: "First, much that has been published by the media in relation to the claimant's paternity remains available online. It is also included in Just Boris, a book written by Sonia Purnell.

"Secondly, the permanent injunction sought by the claimant would only restrain the defendant from referring to the information, although many other media organisations have published the same thing.

"Thirdly, it is fanciful to expect the public to forget the fact that the man who is said to be the claimant's father, and who is a major public figure, has fathered a child after a brief adulterous affair (not for the first time). Nor are they likely to forget the outline facts of the story including the identity of the mother."

The mayor's official spokesman said: "We don't comment on matters pertaining to the mayor's private life."

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If online oversharing is a public health problem, then the state's decision to harness it for its own purposes means that huge, powerful forces within government will come to depend on it

Whenever government surveillance is debated, someone inevitably pooh-poohs the subject as cause for alarm: after all, people overshare so much sensitive personal information with services like Facebook that there's hardly anything to be gleaned from state surveillance that isn't already there for the taking on "social media."

I don't question the assertion that people overshare on social networks – that is, people share information in ways that they later come to regret. The consequences of oversharing range widely, and we hear of any or all of losing a job; being outed to your family or co-workers for your sexual orientation; having embarrassing youthful episodes of intoxication and/or ill-considered opinion forever tied to your name in the eyes of potential lovers, friends, and employers; and alienating friends and family who don't approve of some aspect of your life, associations, or hobbies.

If you live in a dictatorship, the problems are much worse, of course: dictators have used intercepted social media sessions to compile enemies lists, exploring the social ties between activists as a means of determining whom to arrest, whom to disappear, whom to torture, and, according to some human rights activists, whom to murder.

So oversharing is a problem. Does that mean government surveillance isn't a problem?

Quite the contrary. As surveillance becomes the first and last line in modern governance, policing and espionage, it puts the state in a terminally conflicted position over one of the key public health problems of the modern age: privacy.

Many modern public health pathologies – obesity, substance abuse, smoking – share a common trait: the people affected by them are failing to manage something whose cause and effect are separated by a huge amount of time and space. If every drag on a cigarette brought up a tumour, it would be much harder to start smoking and much easier to quit.

If every slice of pizza turned into an instantaneous roll of cellulite, it would be much easier to moderate one's eating. As my GP explained to me when I quit cigarettes, "not getting cancer in 30 years" is a difficult goal to focus on when you want a cigarette now (I quit 10 years ago by keeping in mind that I was spending a laptop a year on cigarettes, and the money was going to the worst companies on earth, firms that literally invented using junk science as a lobbying tactic – I buy a laptop every year now and never feel guilty about it).

Getting better at something without feedback is very hard. Imagine practising penalty kicks by kicking the ball and then turning around before you saw where it landed; a year or two later someone would visit you at home and tell you where your kicks ended up. This is the kind of feedback loop we contend with when it comes to our privacy disclosures.

You make a million small and large disclosures on different services, with different limits on your sharing preferences, and many, many years later, you lose your job. Or your marriage. Or your family. Or maybe your life, if you're unlucky enough to have your Facebook scraped by a despot who has you in his dominion.

Some sharing is definitely in order. Careful, mindful sharing holds enormous benefit for us individually and a society. Sharing is what makes us into a society. We need to be good at it, though – not merely prolific, but skilled. Skill in sharing includes a hard-won, difficult-to-inculcate appreciation of consequences and the ability to weigh them against the benefits.

When a sizable fraction of society has a problem with an activity that has this cause/effect gap, it's customary for the state to intervene through things like public education, labelling rules, help hotlines, and sometimes direct regulation of the system. I'm sceptical of this last as a way of solving the privacy crisis, but I'd be happy to see the other stuff tried well and in earnest – not just the tabloid OMGFACEBOOKISFULLOFPAEDOES noise we usually get.

And here's where the problem with the state's addiction to surveillance kicks in. Governments have woken up to the fact that social media is full of material that might be useful for identifying and prosecuting miscreants, not to mention spying on political activists and "potential terrorists" and people applying for work visas and well, just about everybody.

Pushes like the (dead for now) Communications Data Bill (UK), CISPA (USA) and C-30 (Canada) all sought to recruit the entire internet industry to act as adjuncts to the state's surveillance apparatus, requiring them to retain titanic databases of online activity for government fishing expeditions. And while all three attempts failed, they're just the latest, and certainly not the last – after all, universal internet surveillance was back in the Queen's speech.

That's a crisis. If online oversharing is a public health problem, then the state's decision to harness it for its own purposes means that huge, powerful forces within government will come to depend on oversharing. It will be vital to their jobs – their pay-packets will literally depend on your inability to gauge the appropriateness of your online disclosure.

They will be on the same side as the companies that profit from oversharing, because they will, effectively, be just another firm that benefits from oversharing.

It's as though Scotland Yard decreed that obesity was critical to its ability to catch slow-moving, easily winded suspects. It's as though the NHS announced it would cope with the expense of an aging population by encouraging chain-smoking. The dangers of oversharing are hard enough to manage when it's just the private sector that benefits from them.

When the state announces that a public health problem is integral to its governance strategy, the problem turns into an unscalable, permanent mountain of smoking rubbish that will smoulder for generations.

doctorow@craphound.com

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Bupa approved to access sensitive medical records as campaigners question patient consent for release

Private health firms, including Bupa, can pay £140 to identify potentially millions of patients and then access their health records, detailing intimate medical histories, under a new national arrangement in the NHS, the Guardian can reveal.

The records, which include sensitive information about hospital visits, such as a mother's history of still births, patients' psychiatric treatment and critical care stays, allow individuals to be identified by use of postcode, gender and age as well as their socioeconomic status.

On Monday the government slipped out the news that private insurer Bupa was approved to access England's "sensitive or identifiable" patient data, housed centrally by the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC). It is now among four private firms that have passed the government's vetting procedures.

The charging structure for "bespoke patient-level extracts" was revealed when HSCIC put up a "cost calculator" to work out how much prospective customers would pay for sensitive hospital data. The "indicative fee" for a full set of 20 years' inpatient data was about £8,000 including £140 to make the records identifiable.

The prime minister has argued that companies such as Britain's key life sciences firms should be able to benefit from the NHS's vast collection of patient data. But critics argue that this amounts to putting the NHS "up for sale".

Campaigners say the health service is aping commercial practice – pointing out that only last week the country's largest mobile phone operator announced it was selling the internet habits of its 27m customers.

Phil Booth, coordinator at patient pressure group medConfidential, said: "People are rightly concerned when details of their mobile use or online habits are sold on; now we learn that the NHS is selling masses of highly sensitive medical information to private companies. Like millions of other patients, I'm certain I never gave my consent for that."

The Guardian has established that private companies are already attempting to access patient records which can identify individuals.

In July a private research firm Civil Eyes was granted access to sensitive "consultant code" data. However, in the same month Dr Foster, which produces a guide to good hospitals, was refused permission to obtain patient mental-health data which included date of birth, gender, marital status and NHS number.

Labour called for the practice to be "suspended immediately pending a full investigation". Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham said: "Patients will be appalled to learn that the government appears to be auctioning off their personal information to the highest bidder.

"We warned David Cameron 18 months ago that greater safeguards were needed on the use of data in the NHS. He failed to provide them and, in his drive to commercialise the NHS, he has allowed this unacceptable situation to arise. Ministers need to tell us whether they knew about this practice and whether it was given their approval".

The HSCIC said that it "only provides identifiable data when there is a lawful basis to do so, eg, with patient consent. The data we provide is normally anonymised. We do charge a fee to cover administrative costs of operating an extract/data linkage request. We are committed to ensuring information about our services are presented in a transparent and accessible way and will continue to develop our website to ensure further clarity in this area."

Dr Katrina Herren, medical director of Bupa Health Funding UK, said: "Bupa uses NHS clinical data to support the NHS with services like population health management, and also for benchmarking purposes.

"The government publishes very clear rules on how we can use the data, and we adhere to the highest standards of information governance when handling confidential information."

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The bipartisan privacy caucus has asked the tech giant for answers about its potentially invasive innovation

What's the most dystopic future you can imagine resulting from Google Glass? That facial recognition technology will allow a Glass-wearer to walk past you and instantly know who you are and what you do? That Glass-holes might walk into a train station and instantaneously see Google pushpins tracking any celebrity travelers, the recently divorced or children from wealthy families? Or that data stored on a pair of Google Glasses you've used will be uploaded to a secret government or credit-card company database?

Be provisionally consoled: Congress is making an attempt, at least, to get your back, as the president would say. The congressional bipartisan privacy caucus has sent a letter to Google, asking the company questions about privacy safeguards that will – or won't – be built into its new product.

Google has given privacy advocates cause for grave concern. As the congressional letter points out, the company recently agreed to pay $7m (only) to settle charges with 38 states for the collection of data from unprotected Wi-Fi networks without permission, as its street-view map-mobile drove around.

Past efforts by the congressional privacy caucus have met with ridicule. Its work can look like stodgy Washington sending the hottest tech companies plodding questions about what these newfangled devices do. In fact that's what the caucus' work is – but it's the Lord's work

Previous letters sent by the privacy caucus, which is co-chaired by Democrat Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Republican Joe Barton of Texas, have uncovered important features of the government's domestic spying program. Last year, cellphone carriers reported to the caucus that in 2011 they had received 1.3 million demands from law enforcement for subscriber information. The phone companies handed over locations, numbers dialed and other data, with nary a warrant in play. "I never expected it to be this massive," Markey said at the time.

It would be good to have answers to all the questions the caucus has for Google. How does the company plan to prevent its product from collecting data without user/non-user consent? How does the facial recognition technology work, and can users/non-users opt out? Is any information off-limits?

Congress has given Google a month to reply.

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