Why does digital privacy matter?
In this post I am talking specifically about online privacy in the context of surveillance capitalism. This means privacy from big tech, online behavioral monitoring, and the constant buying and selling of your personal data.
In my experience people either care about privacy online or they don’t at all. Many people have completely given up all hope at online privacy. They are either completely defeatist, apathetic, or defensive/antagonistic when you bring up any thing you do to protect your privacy.
Much of this is because almost all privacy measures come at the cost of a loss of convenience or require self-imposed social ostracization in the form of being left out of discussions that occur on platforms that others use. So the resistance to privacy is totally understandable. While there are small things you can do, embracing online privacy generally requires a large investment of time, mental energy, and/or possibly money.
So, given a lot is being asked of the person, I want to be able to better articulate a number of arguments that I find compelling as to why online privacy is worth fighting for and what we are losing by allowing big tech to become the middle man of all of our conversations, purchases, decisions, news feeds, music queues, exercise, etc.
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The right to sanctuary
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The right to oblivion
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Sorry but it’s just crazy that I can’t speak with anyone without generating a bunch of metadata for a shitty company to hoover up and feed into some horrific AI machine that is hell bent on extracting every penny out of my bank account or manipulating my vote.
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Many of our conversations with our loved ones live in a database somewhere for some four eyed freaks to mine for ‘insight’, sell, or even voyeuristically peruse at their leisure (perverts!)
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Is this world you want to support? The world is a worse place because of these platforms and companies. The incentives of the world have gone upside down. The smartest people in the world are working hard and getting paid very well trying to get you addicted to buying trash online. Don’t support this anymore. It doesn’t need to be this way. There are alternatives and they are dependent on people actually using them.
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This fight is very much still alive so what side are you on? This not over. This is currently being fought over. They are coming for more. The behavioral data surplus is never ending. They want to extract and store every piece of data they can. They would happily store and sift through your literal shit (check out the Kholer dekoda) if they found a way get information that would help them sell you ads. If it is up to them everything will be a subscription, every purchase will spy on you, everything that can be tracked will be tracked. But every ounce of resistance slows down the creeps.
That’s what I have so far. It really is mostly an appeal to emotion at this point. The Right to Oblivion book does a good job making a point of what is actually lost and tries to lay a theoretical framework, but I don’t feel like I have a way to communicate that succinctly.