Just ask any rebellious teen or 90's female celebrity - Privacy matters. It's like, literally a question of life or death.
Imagine staging an elaborate ruse, convincing your parent(s) you're spending the night studying for Finals with your over-achieving friend. Then, at 9pm you ditch her and head to the Party. Shooting cheap vodka, setting the living room dance floor on fire, and if you're like me, smoking a few porch cigarettes while having important loud conversations means this evening is one of the best in your short 17 years of life. Then, your world collapses.
It begins with an incessant buzzing on your phone and when you finally check there's 10 missed calls and 3 texts, the last one in all caps: "WHY ARE YOU NOT AT OVER-ACHIEVERS HOUSE LIKE PROMISED?!?!?"
Drunken damage control sets in and you fire off a quick text, "Oops, yah we wet out 4 food. Wel'l be beck . soonish".
Moments later you realize the Find my Phone app could give away your true intentions so you smugly turn your cell off and down another shot to celebrate, not realizing the Parental Control Units, specifically Mother, is tracking your last known location.
Another hour goes by when suddenly the Party house front door flies open. Standing there in full furiousity is Mother. One of your oldest friends from middle school days offers a tepid, "Hi Mrs. So-and-so" but Mother doesn't acknowledge their presence, refusing to engage or even utter a word. Silently scanning the party for you, she is on a mission and nothing in this world is going to stop her.
Eventually she clocks you flirting with your favorite crush and immediately storms toward you. In your drunken state you're completely oblivious until a horrified look comes over future bae's face.
"Are you alriii...MOM WHAT THE FUCK!!" You scream as her iron grip locks onto your arm. "GET OFF ME, I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU'RE DOING THIS!!!" You hysterically yell as she leads you out of the Party, still without saying a single word.
As the family minivan peels out of the neighborhood you sob in the backseat, realizing how embarrassing of a scene was just made in front of your classmates and how Mother single-handedly crushed the entire vibe of the coolest party you'd ever been to. You whisper under your breath, "i hate you" and Mother icily offers her first words of the evening, "Excuse me, what did you say?!"
You remain silent and pray for death as it's much more preferable than dealing with Mother and facing everyone at school on Monday. As the minivan pulls up outside your house it hits you... why didn't you leave your phone with your over-achieving friend?!
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Everyone should care about their right to privacy - and the fact that more of us do not greatly troubles me. I realize all people value privacy to some degree, but the current state of things is so far from where it ought to be that it's keeping me up at night.
While most of us will never have to fear being constantly tracked and killed for interacting with the wrong people, this reality becomes terrifyingly easy with a sufficient lack of privacy. We are living in a time where the trend is directly towards reducing our right to keep our data private, and it's hidden within a shroud of "progress", "new technology" and "better user experience".
It is now a fact that between your government and the corporations they collude with, nearly everywhere on earth is under some form of their combined cyber surveillance. This GovCorp alliance is silently watching you, violating your privacy by logging your every action to better use your personal data against you. Exposing your brain to information designed to manipulate your opinions, steal your attention, or in the worst cases imprison or kill you.
Fighting back against this modernized invasion of privacy can feel like trying to 'mop the ocean' and for good reason - the power wielded through analyzing your data to curate information that pushes a specific agenda is immense, not to mention the control an authoritarian regime is able to exert.
Our data is an extension of us, representing things like our desires, needs and dreams and access to it allows anyone to learn intimately who we are.
There is a reason you tell your partner and family things you don't share with your coworkers, but in our digital age the line of privacy has been distorted by those in power. They've convinced us that it's fine to share everything with everyone, because Why Should You Care if You've Got Nothing to Hide?
We should care because when we don't have control over our privacy it fundamentally changes who we are. We behave differently when we know big brother (or our schoolmates on social media) are watching, and we lose a piece of ourselves in the process.
True freedom is the ability to act authentically without fear. If you consider yourself a moral person, true freedom is acting authentically without infringing upon others ability do the same.
When anyone can pay a data broker to find your location, purchase history and kinky late-night browsing activity they gain a tremendous power. Your most private information can be used against you, whether in a court of law or public opinion, and this is unfortunately the state we currently live in.
A great example of the effects caused by this type of privacy invasion is the sad story of Britney Spears. Her rise to stardom as a woman in the late 90's meant she was viewed more as an object than a person, meaning most people had no qualms about invading her life, stalking her for photographs and trying to control her behavior even as she struggled with addiction and postpartum depression.
The strain put on her by years of this privacy invading treatment culminated with two, arguably bogus, 5150 involuntary medical holds used by her family to strip her of all agency and place her in a conservatorship. It would take 13 years before she regained control of her life, being milked like a cash-cow, suffering abuses like the withholding of time spent with own children at the hands of her domineering father Jamie, and paying millions of dollars to people with no interest in her well-being.
When talking about privacy and the tremendous value it represents, it's unfortunately quite common to be met with apathy and disinterest, but I can assure you Britney Spears views her right to privacy as something worth protecting at all costs.
The truth is we cannot be truly free without privacy. Self-censoring has been used to control people and society since we first started farming grain and when you're worried about "wrongthink" your mental well-being always suffers terribly.
Without privacy anything you've ever done can be cleverly cast in the worst possible light, giving anyone lacking moral qualms an incredible control over you. Additionally, knowing your preferences and choices allows powerful algorithms to show you tailored information that sways your opinion to the point you end up making choices you'd never have otherwise made.
The future will be built with our personal data, and the coming synthetic general intelligence's will require massive amounts of this data to train themselves, unlocking abilities we aren't capable of fathoming. This path will likely start with AI serving as our personal assistants, meaning they'll need to know a lot of personal details about us. Whoever controls the data in our "details" will wield tremendous power, and I shudder at the thought of it being GovCorp, who would love to have us at their mercy for the forseeable future...
Hopefully by now you've gathered how strongly I feel about the value privacy brings to our lives, society and the future success of the human race. It is my hope that humans will recognize the vital crossroads we are at and begin to demand control over their data in order to preserve their right to privacy. So unless you've got the means to faraday cage your home or live an Amish Mountain lifestyle (see header image), you should care about Privacy. I know I do.
