Reading 06 — I don’t really care if I’m being spied on
To be completely honest, I think it is a little silly that so many people are worried about having complete privacy. There’s no reason to be worried about the government reading your text messages, emails, etc unless you are doing something wrong. The government does not care about your dinner plans Saturday night or that embarrassing video of you that your friend sent you. They do not want the back doors for that stuff, it means nothing to them. Also, many people act like this absolute privacy is something we’ve always had, but I disagree. I really resonate with James Comey’s statement on the matter,
“We have never had absolute privacy in this country. Cars, safe deposit boxes, our apartments, our houses, even the contents of our minds — any one of us, in appropriate circumstances, can be compelled to say what we saw. We have never lived with large swaths of our life off limits, where judicial authority is ineffective. That is something we need to talk about. I don’t think the FBI should tell people what to do. I don’t think tech companies should tell people what to do. The American people need to decide.”
Our lives have never been completely off limits and I don’t see a reason why they need to be. Similarly, Obama reminds us that the government can obtain a warrant, show up at your house, and “rifle through your underwear to see if there’s evidence of wrongdoing”, and they always have been able to do that, so why would it change now that we are communicating electronically? I will gladly let the government look at my electronic communications if it means that they can more efficiently track down terrorists or child pornographers. Like I said, I have nothing to hide, and the government doesn’t care about anything I do so long as I don’t break the law, so what is the big deal? To me it seems like an easy choice to give up some of my privacy in order to help the government do their job better.
In terms of what tech companies are responsible for, I think there is a hierarchy of what they are ethically accountable for. First of all, they should prevent harmful or violent activities from occurring on their platforms. If this trumps some form of individual privacy or requires some sort of government backdoor, so be it. After that they should maintain their users’ individual privacy and protect their data and information from unlawful theft. This includes protection from hackers and other malicious characters. I think that although these two goals seem conflicting, they can be managed in today’s world. I believe that even if the government enforces a back door rule in our favorite social media apps, no one will really notice a difference if they weren’t told the backdoor was added. So we can definitely still feel like we have our individual privacy, unless we break the law. In which case, we forfeit our right to privacy anyways, whether that is physically or virtually.
