Why our decisions about privacy make us more human

Since watching Tom Scott’s talk on Privacy in 2030 I’ve been thinking alot about how I feel when it comes privacy and where the line is for me in terms of how much information I share online. The idea of technology basically being inside my head has always scared me — partly because I’ve read far too many dystopian novels but mostly because even I’m shocked sometimes when my unconscious mind collides with my conscious one — how could I explain some of my odd thoughts to a machine?

I have no idea how to understand myself most of the time, so how could I allow a computer to have continuous access to something that is constantly sending out conflicting signals? To have access to something not even I can control in spite of the fact I’ve lived with it for 23 years?

Right now we have a choice in most cases. And if anything, in 2014 the technology available to humans is allowing us to make more choices than ever before about how private we want to be.

Take Kindles, for example. I snuck a glance over a man’s shoulder on the train the other day and managed to catch that he was reading up on relationships and sex tips. And I started to consider the fact that because he now has a choice to keep the books he’s reading private from (nearly) everyone else, he has more freedom than he would have had in the past. He doesn’t have the embarrassing moment of going to a bookstore and the shop assistant judging his choice. Yes, of course Amazon now holds this data about him, and who knows what they might do with it in the future, but right now he is so far removed from this that he feels like it’s his little secret. Perhaps that’s what enabled him to be able to buy the book in the first place — the fact that no other human would ever really need to know.

There is so much technology now that enables us to keep these little secrets. And human beings love to keep secrets and tell white lies. It makes us feel like we are getting away with something. When I started dating my partner we spent hours listening to and sharing our favourite rock and metal music. We’d send each other links to some of our favourite songs on YouTube or SongCloud.

But I always felt a little relieved that he wasn’t a Spotify user because he would have had a big nose around my playlists and realised that I listen endlessly to ‘Now that’s what I call music’ and have an undying love of Hall & Oates.

Of course I revealed this little secret love of cheesy pop music to him over time, but I revealed it in a way and a speed that felt comfortable to me. What I’m talking about here is obviously no big privacy threat, but what if my relationship had never taken off because my metal head boyfriend had looked at Spotify before our first date and made some judgements about my character without ever getting to know me?

And I guess it’s not the ‘big things’ about privacy that scare me. Right now I don’t care that Google knows where I am and what I search for, I don’t care that Amazon knows what I’ve bought, it makes my life more convenient. But it’s the personal side of things and how much of that information is shared with other human beings that matters to me.

Because computers see things as black and white (well, sort of, if you don’t think too hard about the fact it’s humans that program them). They see the information you give them and the actions you perform as a piece of data to connect with something else, but humans take that data and perceive it in whatever way they know how. People have perceptions about other people, they have emotions and feelings and that can be frightening stuff when they interpret the data that they are processing incorrectly. A computer might tell us the facts about someone’s behaviour online, and humans will jump to all sorts of conclusions about that.

And that’s what makes us human. The ability to choose and make decisions in the way we want to. The choices you have made throughout your life makes you the person that you are today. And right now human beings have a choice when it comes to privacy. We have a choice about what we do and don’t share, and it’s important that we understand and exercise that freedom. Because if we don’t keep making choices about how private we want to be, and if we don’t keep talking and thinking about what we feel comfortable revealing and why, then we might lose the ability to make the choices that make us human beings.