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 a ridiculous extreme. We don’t need to get up to turn on the lights if we just install some kind of “smart” home device. We can order things and have them delivered without even having to open up our computers if we use a “smart” speaker. There’s a cool new smartphone app to do just about anything imaginable.

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. That company then sells the collected information to a data broker, who combines it with information from other companies. Data fusion applied to this information allows unknown third parties to a know a person perhaps more intimately than they know themselves. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to make this problem even worse in the future, when it will be able to operate using data that has been previously collected.

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 dangerous to society 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. Databases of personal information can be purchased or even seized by governments, which can use those data to monitor and even coerce individuals. Freedom and individual liberty depend upon an individual having the ability to separate their existence into different contexts, free from government intrusion.

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 of 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

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 outcomes are not pretty. Civil liberties can be eroded, wars can be started, and serious atrocities can be inflicted. Fighting back against privacy nihilism requires putting in the effort to assert one’s human right to privacy. And effort it is. Regaining and maintaining privacy requires changes in behavior. Contracts and privacy policies must actually be read before clicking “I Agree” – and the button must not be clicked if the privacy losses outweigh the benefits. Choices in apps and devices must be driven by the functionality one actually requires instead of just using something because it is trendy or sounds good. One must be suspicious of any company that offers some kind of discount or perk in exchange for signing up for some membership or program. If enough people are willing to adjust their own behavior, the privacy landscape will shift, since the market will force it to shift. Absent market action, we rely on our government to implement privacy laws and regulations to curb corporate abuses. When the corporations effectively own the government, and when the government’s surveillance interests align with those of the corporations, meaningful privacy legislation remains improbable.

Notes and References

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