Privacy Means… or I For One Welcome our Post Apocalyptic Dystopian Overlords
I like privacy. I admit it. I’m a fan. I talk about it, I think about it, I pay attention to it. I think it matters.
There’s an interesting trend I’ve noticed though, which is I often find myself in weird conversations where I’m wondering what exactly resulted in my failure to communicate.
I swear I started talking about privacy, but somehow I end up in a discussion about how privacy will spell the inevitable end of the world as we know it.
Not by anarchy necessarily, but certainly apocalypse by misery and depression if nothing else. I keep hearing fundamentally the same thing:
“We should have privacy!”
“Yeah! But wait, would that mean we couldn’t have all of our widgets?”
“Oh…”
“But I love my widgets!”
“Yeah I don’t want to live in a cave!”
“YEAH CAVES SUCK”
“YEAH PRIVACY SUCKS.”
The majority of people I talk to seem to think that a world where we had privacy and user protection would genuinely mean a world with no nice things. We’d just have wholesale iPhone burnings at our local schools. Colour would bleed from the world, and we’d all shuffle up to each other in our blasted dystopia and speak in hushed monotones.
Man, privacy does suck…
…wait a second. Is that actually what it means? Are these our options? A world with no innovation, damned for eternity in the technological dark ages, or does it mean something else?
I believe it means something else, but it seems to be a largely misunderstood concept. Sure I call out the current model, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like nice things! Hell, I’m writing this on Medium because it’s genuinely awesome.
So let’s look at some assumptions that cause the confusion
1. Privacy Means No Data
This is a common assumption when privacy is mentioned in the media. The concept that, to have privacy we would invariably have to give up our social data and as a result lose some of the genuinely amazing insights that occurs there.
It is this common assumption that a lot of privacy policies are actually built around, where users are somehow convinced that the only way to have nice things is to be turned into a product.
But this is a fallacy. Privacy implies ownership, and control, the ability to be free from observation (and profiling), not the enforced state of being unable to share your data to an individual service at your discretion.
You want to give your GPS location over to a maps/traffic service who monitors in real time traffic conditions in your local city? Absolutely! But to provide this service, do they need any personally identifiable information? Nope.
So privacy doesn’t mean “no data”, it means no centralized data oversight, and no generalized data rules. It means the user owns their data, and in turn gets to control how, and where it is shared (including the implicit right to revoke that data).
2. Privacy Means No Innovation
Again, this message is very much driven from the source of the privacy violations (see every privacy policy ever).
“If you don’t give us all of your data, we can’t give you nice features!”
This one is a little bit more complex. There is some truth to it, which is that large companies place a greater reliance on data analysis and insight to try to make decisions.
“What percentage of our users clicked the new widgety button?”
“What percentage of our users responded to the daily ice cream pictures we just released?”
“WHO LIKES KITTENS DAMMIT?!?”
Yet how many people can name large incumbent companies that actually provided better features through a decision making process that was a result of data analysis?
Arguably, most innovation comes from smaller companies who don’t have the users or the data to drive their decisions. Instead they have to rely on their own gut instinct, and passions to find something that resonates and works well with users.
In fact, most people feel that later product versions result in a homogenization, or a compromise of the original user’s interest as opposed to what drew them to the service initially.
And once again, why not let the users opt-in to an anonymized tracking tool? Why not let users see the data that has been collected, and then make a decision to send it in?
This model doesn’t prevent focused user analysis, it just places some rules on how much data an individual company or service can collect, as well as what they can do with that data (Use it to give me a better experience? Sure! Use it to profile me!? No thanks.)
3. Private Means Really Complicated and Shitty
Hoo boy. Yeah. You got me on this one. When was the last time somebody liked using a PGP key to protect their email? Or who really could figure out how Diaspora was supposed to work? Pods? What now?
And then it’s like layers and layers of stuff… everything has keys, and passwords, and people are talking about hashes, and you have to read some arcane technical document to do anything.
You’re probably going to have to set up a server, and hire some ninjas, and get a secret note delivered by Stephen Hawking by way of Quantum Encryption.
Screw it.
To be honest, thus far it’s pretty true. There are a few simple exceptions to this, like some of the encrypted chat apps that are out there now, but as a general rule it’s true.
Here’s the deal though, this has more to do with our ability to solve the problem than any fundamental nature of the problem itself.
I can say this with confidence as I’ve been working on KUBE, a Social Network (and more) that at the core level searches to solve for these problems. I can’t say a ton yet, but I can definitely confirm that it’s built for users, not technologists.
At the end of the day, I believe privacy is actually built for data, not against it. I don’t see it as a limiting factor, I see it as a catalyst for so much more and I think this is what privacy means: more of everything we love.
And if worst comes to worst, and privacy will spell the inevitable doom of civilization, I for one will rock the silver spray paint look as I steal your gas.
