Epilogue: The Risks of Complacency

We live in an age of convenience. From our food to our homes and our workplaces, products are readily available to make it easier for us to carry out daily tasks. Modern products take this convenience to an extreme: now it isn’t even necessary to get up to turn on the lights.

This convenience comes at a cost. Many of today’s interconnected products report usage data or other behavioral (and, therefore, personal) information back to the companies that produced them. Websites, which replace inconvenient books and paper forms, are full of tracking technologies. Today, some company is able to tell when someone turns on their lights and what content they like to consume. And that company then proceeds to sell that information to a data broker, who combines it with information from other companies, building a comprehensive profile of that person.

Based on survey data, many people appear unwilling to sacrifice even a small amount of convenience for the sake of privacy.¹ Instead, they subscribe (consciously or not) to the notion of privacy nihilism. In a nutshell, privacy nihilism is the idea that privacy is no longer possible, and it is therefore not worth the effort to try to achieve it.²

Privacy nihilism is a problematic concept for several reasons. First, it is exactly what the large data brokers and other invasive companies are consciously trying to achieve. Conditioning people not to care about their personal information is profitable business. Unfortunately, all the business data collected by siphoning personal information from individuals leads directly to the second, and far more sinister, problem. Individual freedom from oppression requires the ability for a person to be able to live without constant monitoring by a government.

Even if a government doesn’t directly interfere with the day-to-day lives of most of its citizens, the fact that it is watching everything leads individuals to self-censor their own words and actions. Freedom of thought and expression, even if guaranteed on paper, are only true freedoms whenever an individual can explore any subject without fear or recrimination. Making vast quantities of data about individual citizens available to the government is a recipe for creating the conditions of self-censorship and thereby eroding individual liberties.³

Now it might be tempting to believe that the private sector is merely collecting all these data to participate in the surveillance economy, and that the government has little to do with this surveillance. While this notion is largely true at a superficial level, remember that governments can always compel companies to turn over information on demand. Furthermore, the companies themselves can start to regulate individual expression through content moderation, filter bubbles, cancel culture, influence peddling, and numerous other psychological techniques. When companies engage in this mass shaping of opinion, they effectively start to operate as an unelected government – a “Big Other” in Orwellian terms.⁴ In other words, the privacy threat is the same from the public and private sectors.

At its core, privacy nihilism is a form of complacency. When we as a society become complacent, history shows that bad things typically follow. Whether these bad things are the result of an elected government run amok, a repressive dictatorship, or the cumulative effect of unregulated corporate influence in our lives, the ultimate outcome is a reduction in personal freedom.

References and Further Reading

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.