On the morning of September 11, 2001, I watched from my office window in Alexandria, as the Pentagon billowed smoke, and I could feel over-whelming anger welling up inside me.  My wife worked directly downwind from the Pentagon, and, as her office filled up with smoke, she worried that she might be breathing dead bodies.  I think those were probably normal emotions.

Our next door neighbor worked in the Pentagon.  She was forced to flee the Pentagon at a dead run and was sprinting across the grounds when she lost one of her shoes, a red heel.  For whatever emotional reason, she obsessed over that red shoe.  She could not speak of the friends she lost.   She could not discuss the damage to her office.  She could only discuss her lost red shoe.  Maybe, that helped her emotionally to deal with her memory of the tragedy.  However, when we last saw her, 18 months after 9/11, she was still obsessively focused on her lost red shoe.

Maybe, I am becoming the same about privacy, i.e., obsessively focused on losing something that doesn’t really matter.

The latest assault is something called “location sensors,” which are mounted in stores or nightclubs or hospitals or anywhere.  Whenever a Wi-Fi-enabled phone passes by, the sensor records that information and collates with other places that have tracked that phone.  If you subscribe, you can find out how many people within one mile of your home that went to nightclubs last night and which ones.  If you want those people to come to your nightclub or store, you now have a way to advertise directly to them.  Or, you can know how many people in a five-mile radius walked by the office of a oncologist or urologist in the past two weeks. If you want those people to buy your new “cure” for cancer or social diseases, you now have a way to advertise directly to them.

I know, I know . . . cell phones already track our every move, but access to that info is at least somewhat restricted.  A distrustful wife cannot simply call the phone company and ask for the location of her husband’s phone last night.  There are already some weak safeguards against that.

But, there are no safeguards with these location sensors.  Commercial companies collect this information and sell it to local merchants, as well as to the big advertising companies, like Google.  Private investigators will undoubtedly use these services to help distrustful wives and husbands.  It is just another way around the existing weak safeguards.

But, privacy is not about cheating spouses.  It is not about knowing which neighbor is hiding something.  It is not about money.  It is part of who we are, our very identity.  Are we autonomous individuals, as existentialists believe . . . or not?  One of the most important horror stories not written by Steven King was 1984 by George Orwell.  It almost seems innocent to fret about the prying eyes of an all-controlling government, as envisioned by Ayd Rand, when the prying eyes of advertisers are far more pervasive.  Do you really believe the NSA will not subscribe to this data?

I’ve always enjoyed the process of getting to know people.  Like an onion, you peel away layers of family, education, experiences, values, and philosophy to find a real person.  Soon, I’ll be able to quickly download enough information to reach some conclusions — all for a modest subscription fee.  No need to waste time talking with real people!

Young people don’t seem to mind, preferring to receive more interesting advertising specifically targeted to them as individuals.  They will not miss some fuzzy, old-fashioned and over-rated value called privacy.

I wonder if my former neighbor finally got over her obsession about a red heel . . . .and how long it will take me to stop missing old-fashioned and under-rated privacy?