You don’t have a right to privacy. You have something better
What if there was no right to privacy?
That question triggers a surge of righteous rage in many people, especially in the Western world. We rank “privacy” right up there with “free speech” and “freedom of worship.” But as we’ve seen (especially in the past 20 years of the information revolution), the notion of privacy has morphed into something more complicated.
To those who lived through the transition from pre-information to post-information eras, this new reality catches us off guard. In the 1980s, privacy was easy. You knew if you were anonymous. You chose to go public. But in 2019, privacy is challenging. Much of the time, you can’t tell if your actions are public or private — surveillance cameras, GPS trackers, and web tracking is so common that the average person could spend their entire day reading privacy policies and never understand half of it.
At the root of the anger is a contradiction: We want the benefits of modern technology without the intrusion to privacy they require. We don’t want our cars to know where we are … but we want GPS navigation. We want low health insurance rates … but we don’t want to share our dietary and exercise habits. We don’t want advertisers listening in to our conversations … but we want the best deals on products and services tailored precisely to us…
