Privacy vs. Paranoia: David Bond Tries to Disappear [SXSW Film Interview]

If you wanted to hide, why didn’t you just leave England?

I did. Within five minutes of the clock starting, I was on my way out of the country. But after a few days abroad, I felt really compelled to come back. I wanted the film to be about whether it’s possible to live some kind of a normal life while not leaving a whole ream of data.

I met with people who are experts in how to hide—a privacy consultant that hides people for a living and a whole bunch of people who knew about the way the underground world works. I got some tips about how to be careful with getting cash, mobile phones, emails and the rest of it.

Did you feel like you already had kind of an internet presence that you had to go back and erase?

Yeah, I was really aware that they might be able to find some leads based on what was on the Web. But what I found really amazing is how difficult it is to actually erase that stuff.

During the course of the film, I got piles and piles of paper with tons of information about me. And then I went through the process of saying, “Would you mind deleting some of it?” And at that point people just looked at me like I was insane.

As I began to research the film, I got more and more sensitized to the fact that every day we have these interactions with government agencies or corporations, supermarkets, Amazon. And in these interactions we hand over data that we are not aware that we are giving away—our tastes, who our friends are, where we live.

Describe what it is like to be on the run.

It was very hard. I mean, I couldn’t see my friends. I couldn’t see my family. My wife was heavily pregnant.

Within four days of being on the run, I had a really stiff neck. I spoke to a doctor, and he was like, that is a classic symptom of nervous fight or flight. You are constantly preventing yourself from looking over your shoulder, basically. I began to really notice that I wasn’t sleeping, that I was beginning to see faces in the crowds that weren’t there. I was really aware of CCTV. When I stayed in a hotel, if they asked me for my name, I would be like, “why do you want to know?”

I distrusted my friends. I was worried about my family. It got pretty weird. I feel like that was a little taste of what we have all got to come, because as the state and corporations are able to reach further into our profiles and understand us more and more, we have got a lot of paranoia to look forward to, I am afraid to say.

Well, there are two sides to the argument. Right? There's a lot of heat over here in the United States, and I assume, over in England, to catch terrorists before they can commit crimes. And online health records make it easier to keep costs down for hospitals and health care, and things like that.

I absolutely agree with that. But only if we're really accurate with profiling people who are a risk, and that health records should be centralized, [but only] if they consent. If we do it to everybody, and similarly, if we share all of our searches in order to find the very rare, unique example of a terrorist, then to a small extent, we all undermine our privacy. And we just don't know what the consequences of that could be in the future.

The weird thing is that there are private individuals who can find this stuff out. This is not the law that makes this. These are just people like you and me, who can go out there, and who can access all of this data that used to be close to us. We need to see, that's a scary thought.

What's the ideal scenario?

We should be really sensitive, sort of the way you deal with corporations. When they say, "We're giving you $5 off because you're a loyal customer," just think about the value of that $5. You're giving them tons of information, and they're giving you $5. Is that a fair exchange?

I think we should draw some kind of line in the sand. The technology that's come in recently has moved that line so far in favor of the state and corporations. And at some point, you've got to say, "Well, I just want to roll it back.”

I think there are a bunch of things going on in our countries that we need to be very sensitized to. The collection of DNA, government intrusion into our lives, understanding of our tastes, and profiling of us and of our children, the centralization and analysis of our health records. And I’d say a final one is corporations really drilling down into us as individuals and then marketing to us in ways that can be quite sinister.

I’d like to think the people might watch the film and say, "I'm just going to kick back against one of those things. You know, I'm not going to go mad and become a survivalist and go live in the woods. But I'm going to just push back against one of those things." 



This professor of databases in the London School of Economics said, all databases are flawed. On average, 2% of the data in them is just rubbish. So there's a good chance that all of us will become false positives in some database at some stage or another. So his view is feed rubbish to the databases. Quite a nice idea.

What’s the response been like in the U.S.?

This is the U.S. premiere here at SXSW, and we’ve had a fantastic response. People seem to be really plugged into the issue. The U.K. is the third most surveilled state in the world, after China and Russia. The U.S. comes 10th, so, you do better than us. But you’re heading down a road that we’ve already been down. I’d like to think of the film as a warning shot, saying, “Look, this is the way we could go if we continue to gather this data from governments, from private companies, and through the whole social networking site things.”

They’ve actually come up with an ingenious way to make us want to give them our information.

And what’s so interesting is that they offer us what feels like this wonderful free service and we’re very bad at making the judgment as to what it’s really costing us. We’re handing over hugely personal information about our friends, our proclivities, our tastes, and our location. And this is valuable to them. So it looks like a free service on Facebook and Twitter and the rest of that, but is it?

It's a really interesting approach to a topic that many people aren't really dealing with.

Yeah. And I think there's a real group of people over here who really get this, and really worry about it. I've been so impressed. I think it might have to do with the strong streak of individualism that you guys have got over here, a natural suspicion about the state. A natural determination to live individualist lives. We're more pushed down in the U.K.

So, I'm very hopeful for the U.S., but I have to say, the whole war on terror, that we need to hand our information over to prevent terrorist attacks, I think it's gone way too far.

Except terrorism keeps happening, and each time everyone goes, “why didn't we catch that?”

Well, yeah, but then is the answer to catching terrorism to put us all under surveillance? I mean, take your argument to the extreme: we should have a CCTV camera in all of our bedrooms, in every room in the country. And then if someone's making a bomb, we find them immediately. We're obviously not prepared to go that far. So, given that you need to draw the line, I guess the film is asking, “where should it be drawn?”

”Erasing David” premiered at SXSW 2010 but is still available on Amazon Video On Demand. Watch it here.