Is Privacy Worth It?
Could the solution to all our privacy concerns be to renounce it in favor of total freedom of information?
In 2018, Noah Dyer ran as an independent candidate for governor of Arizona. His campaign website featured the typical policies you’d expect from an independent candidate: pro-marijuana legalization, background checks for gun purchases, electoral and criminal justice reform, etc. But the website also had a highly irregular, highly unorthodox section detailing Dyer’s sexual history, financial issues, and other quite personal bits of information.
The page was appropriately titled “New Heights in Transparency,” and it contained disclosures of this magnitude:
[Dyer] has experimented with and advocated for open relationships. He’s had group sex and sex with married women. He has sent and received intimate texts and pictures, and occasionally recorded video during sex. Noah has always been forthright with his partners. All of his relationships have been legal and consensual, never coercive, or abusive, and he condemns such behavior.
All this information was voluntarily disclosed at the start of his campaign, a decision which was explained with a simple rationale:
Think about how much time political campaigns spend digging up dirt on their opponents. Noah is confident that all time spent this way is wasteful and unfortunate. … Do any of the events below affect Noah’s ability to lead our state to a more prosperous future? Not at all, and he’s one of the few candidates who believe you are smart enough to recognize that.
While Dyer’s gubernatorial candidacy fizzled out, his antiprivacy stance is worth reflecting on some more. Despite justifying his transparency on economic grounds (“[the] time political campaigns spend digging up dirt…is wasteful”), Dyer’s actions can facilitate a deeper philosophical debate about the importance of privacy.
Four years before seeking the governorship of Arizona, Dyer launched a campaign of a different sort, a Kickstarter campaign, with the project title, “A Year Without Privacy.”
Dyer’s aim was to raise $300,000 so that he could enlist a film crew to livestream the entirety of his life for a year. The word “entirety” is intended literally: Dyer promised people access to every detail of his life. Every text, email, bank statement, trip to the bathroom, sexual encounter (assuming anyone would want to have sex with him under these conditions). He would revoke his own privacy for an entire year.
Dyer didn’t necessarily want people to view all these activities—in fact, he hoped viewers would respectfully opt out of some of them—but he sought to embody the position that human beings have a right to full information. That meant members of society should have access to his actions—all of them.
As he put it on his Kickstarter page:
I believe that the type of government and society that will persevere while other forms of government fail and are replaced, is a government that does not recognize the right to privacy, but rather says that everyone in a society has the right to perfect information, so that they can act according to their own best interest.
What’s interesting about Dyer’s argument is that it relies on the same premises universally accepted by privacy advocates. Many people who are concerned about governments or corporations collecting people’s data call for an increase in privacy protections. Dyer shares the general concern, but goes in the opposite direction: we ought to thwart the insatiable drive governments and corporations have for our data by divulging it ourselves.
He points out in his Kickstarter video that governments and corporations already have access to large amounts of our private information. Anything useful they can collect from us, they already collect. And everything they can do with this data, they already do. In turn, it is they, and not us, who benefit from privacy laws:
So long as you push to reclaim the personal privacies that are being trampled by government and big business, you will also never get those organizations to act transparently. The same logic that allows you to burp, fart, pig out, have an affair, or anything like that in the privacy of your own home, allows your government officials to hold secret meetings where they can buy and sell votes and political favors.
Essentially, Dyer’s argument is that life without privacy — a future some of us feel is inevitable — might actually be good, or better than our current set-up, at any rate.
Devious people — corrupt government officials, unethical business leaders, and everyday criminals — are the ones truly benefiting from current privacy protections, and the rest of us are letting them do so out of fear over our own discomfort. If we were willing to face this discomfort, which we would inevitably get used to, it would effectively neutralize those who currently exploit our information for their ends.
Why does Dyer’s utopian forecast seem so different in character than how the rest of us envision the end of privacy will look like? One answer lies in the fact that we only partially imagine of the end of privacy; we don’t actually ever envision a true, absolute end of privacy. We envision a future in which the common person lacks privacy, but not powerful institutions—the latter, in our mental renderings, retain robust forms of privacy, yet they get to fully control ours. In 1984, it’s the elites who peer into the lives of others, instead of everyone having the power to surveil everyone else.
Dyer’s argument is that the only antiprivacy future that is any good, or bearable, is one in which we go all-in by making privacy obsolete. This suggests that the reason it’s bad for elites to be in possession of our data is not because it makes us uncomfortable, but because there are tangible ways they can use this data to advantage themselves on our behalf. It’s a cliche, but information is power, yet it can only be leveraged into power when it’s asymmetrically accessible, when the ruling party has it and the others do not.
Versions of this argument have previously been offered by various hacktivists and whistleblowers—for example, see the Freedom of Information movement written about here.
But those with more traditional views argue that radical renunciation of privacy is the wrong approach—renouncing privacy could theoretically result in information equality, but increasing privacy protections along with institutional transparency would further the same goal without the massive sacrifices. Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s Data as a Property Right policy, and Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-Mo.) Do Not Track Act, are examples of cross-party initiatives focused on the question of taming Big Tech’s capture of data and bolstering Americans’ privacy protections.
Antiprivacy theorists argue that these regulations are half-measures—they’re mere prohibitions, not really capable of fixing the information imbalance that inevitably results from any version of a pro-privacy regime.
On the other hand, the practical obstacles to implementing Dyer’s vision are legion. Society is currently structured, as historically all societies have been, to accommodate privacy. Were we to effectively eliminate secret information, it would require a massive upheaval. Passwords would need to be replaced by individuating biometric measures—like fingerprints or retinal scans; accounts and ledgers would need to give way to blockchains; taboo behavior would need to cease, or be embraced while the persons engaging in it would push for its destigmatization.
Governments, too, would need a deep reconfiguration—for national security reasons, implementing such a radical antiprivacy stance could not even come up for discussion unless other nations were willing to adopt the same policy. Good luck with that. Even then, for reasons outlined in the international relations literature on the security dilemma, states would have an interest in secretly pursuing data capture despite nominally adhering to antiprivacy.
Most significantly, the will for such radical openness is not really there. When the average person says they want to be protected from Big Tech manipulating their data or from government knowing too much about them, they don’t imagine for a second that divulging all of their secret information, for literally anyone to access, would represent a desirable countermeasure.
Still, the privacy issue is not going away, and if Dyer and other privacy skeptics are right, society’s increasing digitization is only going to empower big corporations and governments further. Maybe we’ll make our peace with that. Or maybe, defanging them is worth everything—even your neighbors finding out about that that thing you did with that person that one day.
Inés Fernández writes about technology and politics. Follow her on Twitter @inesferhumi.
