Is Privacy Dead?

This is one of an occasional series examining misconceptions that people have about personal data empowerment and personal data stores.

Sometimes in debates about personal data people at opposite ends of the spectrum seem to end up agreeing. Privacy is a case in point. “Privacy is dead!” declare some campaigners. “That’s a terrible thing! Something should be done about it!”

“Privacy is dead,” agree some Big Tech apologists. “It’s just an inevitable by-product of the way technology is evolving. Get used to it!”. The two sides might disagree about whether privacy being dead is good or bad. But they agree on the underlying point nevertheless.

This isn’t helpful, and this blog explains why.

‘Resistance is futile’

First, we need to be wary of the ways in which some people use claims about ‘facts’ as stalking horses for the hidden agendas. The claim that ‘privacy as dead’ is a case in point.

The underlying message of the ‘Privacy is dead, get used to it’ brigade, for example, is that “resistance is futile”. This is the central message of all tyrannies, because tyranny only succeeds when people accept that resistance is futile. The other side of the coin is that tyrannies always fail once people adopt the stance ‘we will resist, no matter what’.

Either way, this isn’t actually a debate about the facts (in this case the supposedly unstoppable impacts of new digital technologies). It’s about whether we accept, or refuse to accept, something that is toxic and unfair.

So what are the facts?

Leaving the rhetoric of hidden agendas aside, what are the facts about privacy? In simple terms, it’s true that in order to operate, many digital services have to do things that are potentially invasive of privacy. To provide a location-based service for example, you have to know where the person is located. The question then arises, what does the organisation collecting this data do with it?

It’s also true that new digital technologies and services are generating data about things that were once intensely private — such as search generating real time data about our personal interests and intentions. Which again, raises profound questions about how such information is used, by who.

However, it’s also true that even though platforms like Google (Alphabet), Facebook (Meta) and Apple have accumulated eye-watering amounts of data about people, they still actually know surprisingly little about us. That’s because equally eye-watering amounts of data are held by other bodies that these platforms have no access to — bodies like banks, health services, tax authorities and other public services.

The way our data system is structured means that individuals’ data is dispersed across hundreds of different organisations. Try as hard as they might, via various schemes and initiatives, the digital platforms’ most determined efforts to move into these spaces (via health and financial apps and services for example) have resulted in only minor inroads.

So, No. The dispersed nature of today’s data ecosystem means that no matter how some people might wish otherwise, privacy is not dead, because no single organisation has access to all the data they need to kill it.

What do we mean by ‘privacy’?

There are, however, some important subtleties in this debate. It doesn’t help, for example, that ‘privacy’ has become a bit of an Alice in Wonderland word, where people use to mean what they want it to mean.

For some people, privacy is mainly about civil liberties and the dangers of an all-too-powerful ‘database state’. For others, it’s about ‘surveillance capitalism’ and the activities of big commercial platforms like Facebook and Google. For others, it’s a simple sense that we don’t like people snooping into our affairs.

These are all real issues, but they are not necessarily the same issues requiring the same solutions. When a word is used to mean whatever a person wants it to mean, debates can quickly get lost in crossed purposes without finding a way forward.

That’s why we at Mydex stay clear of the word ‘privacy’ if we can. Instead, we focus on the human needs and emotions that debates about privacy relate to, such as:

• Safety: not being put at risk of harm or abuse
• Agency / control: being able to act effectively in the world as opposed to feeling powerless and helpless
• Fairness: not being taken advantage of; not having to submit to another party’s excess power

Also, while privacy and data protection lie at the heart of everything we at Mydex do, we are not pursuing the goals of ‘privacy’ or ‘control’ as ends in themselves. We are just as much pursuing them as means to another end: of enabling individuals to access and use their data to manage and improve their own lives. ‘Privacy’ is not just about abstract principles. It’s about the practicalities of getting stuff done in our lives. It’s about utility: the practical benefits of utility and its emotional benefits, arising from a sense of safety, agency and fairness.

When you see privacy in these practical human terms, the answer to the question becomes instantly clear. ‘Privacy’ will never die because human beings’ quest for utility, safety, agency and fairness will never die.

The Privacy Paradox

Another subtlety in this debate lies with the privacy paradox. In survey after survey people say they are extremely concerned about privacy issues, but their day-to-day actions seem to belie this concern. Just look at the way people fail to assert their rights to stop cookies being placed on their computer, or tick boxes giving unnecessary consent to organisations accessing their data.

For some, this is evidence that people don’t really care about privacy at all: “People say they care because they know they should. But they are dissembling. We don’t need to take what they say at face value”.

There is, however, another much better explanation of this phenomenon. It boils down to ‘learned helplessness’. If people begin to believe that no matter how hard they try, they still won’t be able to affect the outcome, then they stop even bothering to try.

Learned helplessness is compounded by other human factors like salience and so-called ‘hyperbolic discounting’. Some things — like chocolate — offer immediate tangible benefits. With other things however, like saving for a pension, the costs are immediate and tangible but the benefits are diffuse and distant. The more diffuse and distant something becomes, the harder it is for us flawed humans to act on it as we should.

Protecting our privacy can often seem very diffuse and distant, especially when we are busy trying to access a service to get something done. Knowing this full well, many organisations have developed the art of confusing, bamboozling, overwhelming and obfuscating to such a high degree — with hundred-page gobbledygook small print infested privacy policies and T&Cs, for example — that for many people learned helplessness is now their default mode of behaviour.

Which takes us back to the ‘resistance is futile’ argument, except this time the statement ‘privacy is dead’ reveals itself not as a statement of fact but as a statement of intent: that they intend to make resistance futile, if at all possible. They want to make people feel as helpless as possible.

Conclusion

For us at Mydex, personal data empowerment is about a lot more than ‘privacy’. It’s about the human needs and emotions of safety, agency and fairness that underlie it. And it’s about being able to express these needs and emotions practically: being able to collect and use our own data to improve our own lives.

Given this, there is one aspect about the privacy debate that we don’t like. By focusing only on what organisations do with the data they collect, debates about privacy tends to generate a negative framing: a focus on how to stop organisations doing bad things — which ignores the other, more important side of the coin of how to empower citizens to do positive things.

In the context of empowering people to use their own data to improve their own lives, ‘privacy’ is a simple, basic sine qua non; a foundation for everything else that follows. Once people are provided with the tools that make it simple and easy to collect and use their own data for their own purposes, ‘privacy’ becomes a no-brainer.

Far from being dead, it’s only just waking up.