Enduring myths about privacy
When I talk to people about the dangers of ubiquitous surveillance, from tech companies tracking our online movements to governments collecting and storing our personal records, I am often met with refrains that sound very similar to each other. Even in this post-Snowden, post-Cambridge Analytica era, people seem to wonder why any of this is even a problem. What possible harm come your way if Facebook for example maintains a record of every single activity on its platform ?Some appear to believe that whatever privacy is lost when engaging with online services is outweighed by the benefits they gain from it.
Underlying these responses are a set of assumptions about the role that privacy has in one’s life and how privacy, or lack of it, mediates our relationship with each other, corporations and government. When you dissect these to the fundamentals, you uncover a set of myths that explains the attitude of indifference to these concerns.
1. People who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear
I am going to first say that it is very unlikely that anyone actually believes this to be true. Almost everyone cares about their privacy whether they realize it or not. Ask anyone who disagrees whether they are fine if every single conversation they have ever been a part of were to be broadcast on the internet? Ask them if there is something about their lives that they don’t feel comfortable discussing with friends, or even close family. How do they feel about recording every single movement of their lives and sharing the same on social media?
I doubt if anyone would be comfortable with these scenarios. And yet, that does not mean that they have committed a crime or done something unethical. For example, it is perfectly normal to share some viewpoints only within a trusted group, just as there is nothing illegal in wanting to keep private some innocuous but embarrassing event in your life. The idea that anyone who insists on privacy has something terrible to hide has to be one of the most pernicious ideas to arise from this debate.
In fact, it is in a private space that we can explore new patterns of thought, understand ourselves better, develop novel ideas, hone our creative instinct and cultivate meaningful dissent. Privacy plays an important role in identifying and shaping the inner voice which defines our personalities.
2. Implicit faith in the organizations that access or store the data
Even though the recent few years have made people skeptical of the tech giants and their ability or even willingness to guarantee the privacy and security of our data, there is still the general idea that most organizations — and government — that has access to our data do not use it for malicious purposes. If anything, the experience of using the platforms and services improves when you choose to share more data with them, a point they never fail to remind you when requesting for more permissions.
The reality however is fundamentally incompatible with this viewpoint. First, given the fact that firms make a ton of money from user data, they have little incentive to limit their usage, unless there are strong regulations they are forced to abide by. Further, the data that you provide across different websites and services, are often collated, either through third party trackers or more direct partnerships resulting in far greater personal information than what you might assume. Second, this data is shared with governments upon request (under vague legal mandate depending on the region and government) and if there is any reason for governments to learn more about you, they have access to large volume of your online activity. Third, even if the companies have the best intentions, and ensure the best data protection practices, there is nothing to guarantee that there are no bugs that will leak user data or prevent hackers from breaching their systems. To be sure, this is not some far-fetched scenario because major data breaches are far more common than you may think. Even if you assumed that the firms themselves were acting in your best interests, that can no longer be true with those who now access the leaked data.
And the situation with a national citizen registry project like Aadhar is far worse. The number of data breaches are staggering, and given the fact that it represents the vast majority of the population, the risks are far greater.
3. I am fine with my data being available and accessed
Even if you truly do not care about who has access to your data, you would agree that there are others such as journalists and their sources, lawyers and clients, medical professionals and patients who should be entitled to appropriate measure of privacy. One of the greatest dangers today is how easily you are compromising someone else’s privacy when you do not care about it yourself. What truly enabled Cambridge Analytica to harvest such a large amount of user data is that the original study was able to access not just the participants who had consented to provide their data, but that of all their friends on FB as well (this was enabled by default on FB in 2014). Likewise, when you allow an app to give permission to access your contacts, you’ve just handed over the data of hundreds of people without their consent to a third party. This is also what enables apps like TrueCaller to detect your number even though you may not be using it and do not wish to have your details with them.
4. Privacy is my personal preference
It would be a serious mistake to frame the debate on privacy in terms of purely personal preference. The importance of privacy extends beyond that of any individual and to the wider society, playing an essential role in democratic process and protecting the rights of minorities and vulnerable communities.
Dissident political activity may not be something that may please the government it is aimed at but that is precisely why it is a critical part of a healthy democracy. Protests and agitations involve coordinating strategies, discussions on tactical approaches and resolving differences among various factions. If the government can spy on any individual with just their telephone number or email address, that immediately confers an enormous leverage in terms of limiting the effectiveness of nascent or even established movements. One cannot overstate the importance of major social movements in history including that of abolishment of slavery, advancement of women’s rights, LGBT equality, ending racial segregation and apartheid, defending the environment and vulnerable indigenous communities, etc. Had the government been able to learn every detail of dissident activity, the trajectory of social progress may have looked very different.
This is exactly why the Chinese government has been experimenting with its more extreme surveillance technological capability in Xinjiang, a province that comprises primarily of the minority Uyghur community, who have faced persecution by the government for a long time. China imposes several restrictions on what the residents in that province can do and the surveillance dragnet aims to identify any behavior that is not deemed ‘normal’.
While Chinese policy shows a particularly callous disregard for privacy, that does nothing to assuage the concerns of expansion of surveillance capabilities elsewhere.
One of the chilling consequences of undermining privacy of communication is the silencing of potential whistleblowers who may otherwise have chosen to come forward with information on corruption or wrongdoing by the most powerful people in government.
Even if you live in a country where you completely trust the government and agree with all its policies (I strongly doubt there is anyone like that), you should still be concerned about privacy because that government can change and the successor may not be as much to your liking. The fact that privacy is given a short shrift by a government, even one that you trust immensely, implies that a precedent has been created providing legal justification and the technological infrastructure and capability to carry out surveillance by all governments that follow. Your politics may be on the left or right, but if you believe in the principle that those in power should be held accountable or that citizens have a right to free speech and organize protests and demonstrations, then you should recognize that privacy is indispensable.
These issues have even greater relevance today as the tech companies integrate themselves more and more in our lives happen to share information about users with the government, and often do so without notifying the users of the fact. It is difficult to know the type and extent of personal data that ends up with the government without consent, partly because few people are aware of — or can control — the extensive tracking that is carried out across the cyberspace. This explains why governments are desperately fighting against end to end encryption because that form of cryptographic security guarantees that even the firms running that service would not be able to access the content of the conversations.
While privacy of any individual is very important, focusing exclusively through that lens would lose sight of the wider picture, which has much greater consequences in the long term. Someone may not care much about their day to day texts or conversations being spied upon but some reflection would reveal that this capability poses a grave threat to democratic freedoms.
5. Ignoring the fact that Data is Money
For those who assume that services like Facebook or Google are free, remember that these firms literally make billions of dollars with the users data through ad revenue. Without the data we provide, their business model would collapse.
Even if the principle of privacy as such does not persuade you, then surely the fact that personal data has enormous monetary value should imply that there are well defined restrictions on collecting, storing, processing, accessing, sharing and using it. This would be natural if we are talking about important physical resources like oil or precious metals. Why should it be any different with data?
It is therefore a matter of concern if details on what data is being collected, and how it is being processed or who is it being shared with is not made transparent to the user or is hidden behind lengthy terms and conditions that nobody in practice reads. As pointed out earlier, most of us are often unaware of the extent of tracking when using popular services online. Indeed, this was the motivation behind formulating GDPR, the data protection law in Europe that came into force a little over a year ago, and unsurprisingly Google has been slapped with fines for violations. It would appear that more such violations will be uncovered and fined in the future.
If we really think through the far-reaching consequences of issues related to privacy and specifically how technology and the internet has fundamentally changed the modes by which privacy is secured or lost and the vast amount of digital trails that we leave behind (far greater than at anytime in human history), we might begin to appreciate the need for taking it seriously both as individuals and as a society. The Cambridge Analytica scandal for example alerted a lot of people to the potency of large collection of personal data but that is only the tip of the iceberg. Failure to act decisively on this matter may soon find us heading towards a full fledged surveillance society, the forerunners of which are to be seen in China’s Xinjiang province.
