A few days ago was Data Privacy Day. While I was not writing on this blog yet, it seems very timely this year because privacy has been on my mind even more than usual.
Why do I care about privacy? Why not just go with the flow? I am not a criminal nor do I have “anything to hide”… right? And anyways, it’s a losing battle. What can one little individual David do against a horde of Goliaths?
In a pitch for one of his new products back in 1999, Scott McNealy (Sun Microsystems) said, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” Right?
In 2009, Eric Schmidt (Google) stirred up a lot of controversy by saying, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” He has a point: shame is one way societies control bad behavior. What’s the problem with him pointing that out?
Many people tell me something similar: they don’t care if some nameless computer tracks their behavior because they have nothing to be ashamed of. And anyways, in return, we receive a wonderful world of services and products that make our lives better, for free! So stop complaining and just enjoy it!
Problems in Paradise
Political events of the past month have really caused a lot of people to wake up to some of the problems in this “paradise” of free tech. I don’t agree with many of the extreme views on any side, but the fact that certain platforms can simply ban wide swaths of opinion from being expressed, and even kill off competing companies that don’t share similar policies, is scary. Even if you think the tech giants didn’t go far enough in this case, remember that this same power can be turned against your side as well.
I believe most people instinctively know something’s not right with the surveillance-based business model of the Internet. The Pew Research Center found that even average people do feel insecure about all the data being collected about them, but aren’t sure what to do about it. And just six months ago, Pew reported that 86% of Internet users want companies to be forced to ask permission before disclosing their personal information.
Why Privacy is Important
Privacy is generally important in our fallen world because we weaponize information against each other. It is even more important in the age of viral memes, the culture of moral outrage, and social media mobs. Your privacy is hard to get back once lost, and you don’t know when you will become a target, especially in a quickly shifting political environment.
More specifically, privacy from large entities such as the government and large corporations is important because information is power, and too much power concentrated in one place is a temptation for our fallen human nature. It tends to get abused, whether for greed or control. People from all political persuasions have recognized this. Amnesty International, for example, in their excellent report on the topic, goes as far as to say that privacy should be considered a human right, or at least, that a lack of privacy threatens other human rights.
It’s not just that you might be targeted or banned for having the wrong thoughts. With as much as these tech giants know about us, they can (and do!) engage in mass-scale manipulation of opinion by tailoring what they show us based on what they know about us. Many times we don’t even know we are being shaped by their unseen goals.
There is so much to say on this topic, but I am trying to keep my posts reasonably short, so I stop here.
What is the Solution?
In my next post, I will explore some solutions at a high level. I will also document some specific steps I have taken over the years, and additional steps I am taking now.
More Interesting Links
Here is a list of other crazy things Eric Schmidt (from Google) has said, such as “The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”
The Eternal Value of Privacy by Bruce Schneier
How the Digital Age is Impacting Our Personal Privacy: A Beginner’s Guide to Online Privacy at webhostinggeeks.com
Some commentary on this topic in light of the recent events
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