Why Privacy is worth fighting for.
Published
Privacy is defined by many as the ability to hold parts of yourself secret. It’s the right for you to choose how you portray yourself, what views you openly share to the world and what you hold true to your heart. We hear a lot about privacy these days from this perspective of secrecy, that if you are private then you are trying to hide away something. But privacy isn’t about hiding, it’s about protection.
The future is dangerous, and privacy is your only shield.
Looking back at history, there were several things that were illegal to be, you couldn’t be queer, you couldn’t fight for change, you couldn’t be part of religions, and so on. These things are legal now, but they can always be made illegal at the hands of a dictator or as a result of a coup. Like waves of an ocean, momentum can go back and forth between these different efforts, and predicting the future is impossible so there’s no way to know what will be made illegal in the future.
We all have something that can be criminalized, whether it be race, religion, ethnicity or something entirely different. There is no way to remain innocent in the future, for we have no idea what it entails.
Privacy is your shield.
The ability to hold information about yourself which would otherwise be incriminating in the future is a right, and it needs to be protected at all costs, or else we would all be in danger of what the future holds. Humans change their minds and their opinions all the time, but the lack of privacy means that earlier opinions are withheld, and given the same weight and meaning in the eyes of tyrants even though they’re outdated. Imagine if you were incriminated for an essay you wrote decades ago, that’s the sort of fundamental illogicity that mass surveillance hides. Opponents to privacy usually don’t consider this future aspect, they simply focus on the now, they will inquire incessantly about the worst kinds of people, over and over: “Do they deserve privacy? Aren’t they awful? Do you agree with me or are you one of them?”
This bad-faith argument and debate has made me lose hope, I see more and more people giving into it and not seeing privacy as protection against what the future holds. People today openly share everything that they’ve ever done, not aware that there are billions of bots recording every single image, every single post, every single thought, all to be stored forever and analyzed in the future. We frequently invite the public into our homes, what once were meant to be safe spaces for the true, private us.
It’s no secret that this anti-privacy thinking and mindset has coincided with the rise of search engines, social media platforms, Big Data. There are some very monied interests in the background ensuring that our every thought is available as a database, but we, the public, also assume that information is naturally meant to be public, that if you look up someone’s profile, you should naturally be able to see their every thought stretching back years and years.
Transparency vis-a-vis privacy
It’s natural to assume that our elected leaders, those who hold power over us, should not be private. That we, the people, should be able to look through their communications to ensure that there are no undemocratic conflicts of interests. But this belief has been somehow extended to average citizen, who should be permitted to keep whatever they want hidden. Transparency between organization and our elected leaders are always going into conflict with the privacy of normal individuals.
We’re being led to believe that privacy is a zero-sum game, that if some people can’t have it, then no one can have it. But it really does not need to be that way, we have evidence in the form of scandals, dictatorships and documented evidence that a lack of transparency in leadership usually leads to bad outcomes, but there is no evidence that a lack of privacy for citizens leads to bad outcomes.
In fact, even in today’s mass surveillance world, terrorist attacks still happen, criminality still happens. Criminals aren’t motivated by privacy or a lack of it, they are motivated by external factors: Propaganda, belief, finance and mental stability. A criminal does not care if you give them privacy or not, they will commit crimes either way because there are certain rewards, all from financial to psychological.
So this anti-privacy crusade only seeks to ruin us of our most valuable tool to protect ourselves. Criminals will run rampant regardless of if the government surveils us or not, but the government is always able to stretch and re-define the term “criminal” to include any one of us. Governments will always end up finding new categories of criminals to persecute, that is the entire point of the law, and this is why transparency for them and privacy for us is a good thing, it protects us and it exposes any immoral actions within government offices.
What next?
We need to build a movement for preserving privacy, for preserving the civil liberties we have enjoyed. In a democracy, people are expected hold views, but under mass surveillance, people will likely not express those views out of fear for future retribution. Privacy is our shield against this, and that is why it is important to fight for it, or else, we’d present an opening for enemies to attack our democracy.
Today is November 14th, the Danish government has introduced a new form of Chat Control, one that is worse than the previous, and they seem confident that their attack on our civil liberties will be successful. This form of surveillance will impact everyone, it will make small businesses suffer and, once again, it will only help those who wish to destroy our democracy *cough* *cough* Putin
I’ve been working on this entry for a while, I still don’t think it’s quite enough, as in, I could’ve gone on more about why I believe privacy is worth fighting for, with maybe some concrete examples. But I want this to also be useful, and it needs to be short in order for it to be of any use. I’ve tried to future-proof this post as much as possible, I want this blog post to be something to return to, whenever you need a reason to fight for privacy. Don’t let those in power extinguish the flames of liberty in the name of security!