The Death of Privacy

The Death of Privacy

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
Mark Twain

We are defined by certain natural inalienable rights. “No one has a right superior to those of anyone else. We are born with these rights. We do not get them from government, or any other institution. Those rights are accorded by higher law. Our right to live our lives as we wish – to purse happiness as we think best, by our lights…provided we respect the equal rights of others to do the same.” (Pilon, June 1, 2009) These rights are the very foundation from which our society and democracy stands, as posited by our founding fathers, John Locke, and other great thinkers.

The right to privacy – to be left alone – is embodied in the pursuit of liberty, under the “Blessings of Liberty,” along with the right to Life and the Pursuit of Happiness. It was immortalized into the declaration of independence by our founding fathers for good reason. Privacy was further codified into the constitution by Justices Warren and Brandeis in the late 19th century in reaction to tabloid journalism that infringed on that right. In fact, the spark that ignited the revolution was mainly attributed to the invasion of privacy: the quartering of British soldiers in people’s home, and search and seizure without justification, both which struck at the core of why people came to America – to enjoy certain freedoms they couldn’t get from European rule.

Privacy was something we took for granted would be there in perpetuity because we thought the tenets of the constitution would be forever upheld. Though events such as war, i.e., the Civil War, 1st and 2nd World War may have justified the temporary suspension of some of those rights for certain groups of people in lieu of national security, for the exception of 9/11, much of those liberties were restored when War ended, or the imminent threat greatly mitigated. Lately though, privacy, along with other liberties, has been under continuous assault, not only for the sake of security and safety, but for a host of other reasons unrelated to security with no hope of restoring those liberties, and we’re not or haven’t been at war or imminent threat.

The Founders may not have foreseen all possible scenarios that would compromise those liberties, but did a good job in creating a framework from which government would secure those rights, prohibiting institutions, however advance, sophisticated or powerful, from infringing on those basic natural rights. They also intended to prohibit an elite or a majority from imposing their will on those deemed inferior by virtue of their lack of wealth, power, political voice, representation or differences of opinion. Social media, technology and the widespread privacy intrusions we’re experiencing today, could not have been envisioned by our Founders when they immortalized the words (liberty as an unalienable right), but I’m sure they certainly intended these new events to be included.

Humans have the capacity of great humanity and great capability (as evidenced by the creation of this great republic), but also have the greatest propensity for greed, corruption, exploitation and incredible cruelty. The fulcrum from which freedom rests depends on those who remind us why those fundamental rights exists, and fight for them verses those who forget their purpose, and forfeit them in exchange for some perceived benefit (security or convenience). However well-intentioned governing bodies start, they usually end up being influenced by powerful (self-serving) interest and devolve into something less than ideal – human’s propensity to garnish more power and wealth to themselves. Power, influence, and prestige gravitate towards great wealth (and power). From this emerges an elitist’s attitude that distinguishes itself (superior) from those without that influence: power, prestige and wealth. Eventually this leads the elite to leverage that influence to retain (and attain more) what they have by manipulating a system that controls the less powerful, to the detriment of fundamental human rights, usurping and redefining those rights – it’s also much easier to get larger segments of the population to run the lowest sector of the economy if you can control or limit their opportunities.

Through the eyes we peer out from, we intuitively and innately feel unique that sets us apart from other individuals, and distinguish us from other species. From that felt sense of individuality, we come to believe that we are free thinking spirit. And from this sense of uniqueness, our essence, men deduced certain intrinsic value to being human, i.e., natural concepts or constructs like rights, innately and inalienably belonging to us; that is, they could not be taken away from us because it was considered above men. And what are institutions if not made and comprised by men?

From these core rights, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, our founders built a framework of rules (regulations and laws) that would govern the conduct of human behavior so that individuals would be safe to pursue, unfettered, living and happiness, provided they didn’t infringe on the rights of others, which should be the goal of all individuals. Healthy citizens meant a healthy and balance society. Can you imagine happiness without privacy? Can you think of Liberty and freedom without privacy?

When our self-perception, self-awareness, who we think we are, our sum total experiences, including our innate thoughts, feelings, proclivities, inclinations, ideas, aspirations, motivations, the very essence of who we are, compromised not only by the assumption that it is ok for others to be privy to it but judged us as well, do we not feel as though something sacred from us has been taken away?

When our personal sphere, the space we deemed sacred, secure and safe, gets breached without our permission, our trust is violated, and our natural response is the survival fight or flight mechanism, avoiding or mediating that which makes us uncomfortable. If you doubt this, try watching a complete stranger at a distance in a cafe, who happens to be reading or working, and see for yourself how quickly that surveillance makes that person uncomfortable; their eyes will blink almost immediately. At its worst, surveillance provokes violence (you wouldn’t do it to someone like Travis Bickle in Taxi – “You, looking at me?” Sorry for the parody.). Or try this experiment. Put out a bird feeder (with bird seeds, of course), and observe the birds tolerate your presence while feeding at the feeder. Next, try to spy on them at a greater distance; the moment you do, they will get nervous and fly away. We have an instinctual nature against surveillance, because that instinct was integral to our survival – it had an evolutionary benefit. “Surveillance is perceived as a threat…because it makes [us] feel like prey.” Biologist Peter Watts. (Schneier, 2015). And prey is that which get consumed, exploited, used for the benefit (profit) of other creatures, in this case, institutions or individuals. Information that is used without our permission is invariably done for profit. Whether that be an individual seeking to exploit a compromising piece of information on someone for social recognition or validation, or institutions that used it to target you with advertisement, or spy on you, the motive and end game is the same: advantage, gain, profit.

Privacy is the sanctity of that personal space that provides us the insulation against being vulnerable and exposed, to freely think and behave in a manner we don’t ordinarily do in public, amidst friends, relatives, acquaintances or strangers. When you take a shower, you do it alone (most of the time), and sometimes you sing. And the sheer act of singing implies the comfort you feel in that personal private space to be yourself you don’t ordinarily behave in public (for most of us). When you’re in confession with a therapist, priest, doctor, or a very trusted friend, most of the time it’s done in private. Can you imagine having your therapy sessions in a public café? When you have sex, you do it with your partner alone. When you chose to peruse or read certain subjects (whether at the library, bookstore or on the internet), sometimes you prefer to do it alone. Can you imagine someone looking over your shoulder to see what you’re reading; there’s a certain peace and serenity in that space you deem personally, privately yours. It’s a space for worship, for meditation, your communion with the divine or living in the moment, for reading, for being creative, for being innovative, for reflection. “… freedom is this: Being at home with oneself in an other.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. i. Who we are, our identity, is always in a state of flux as the result of those private or public moments, because public moments demand certain expectations from us, roles we have to don to dynamically interact with others: Father, son, brother, lover, friend, patient, victim, supporter, teacher, employee, manager, proprietor, etc. This seems to goes against the statement by Mark Zukerberg who claimed: “You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

Your beliefs systems, your personal experiences, should have the degree of privacy, until you choose to share them. How you feel about your boss, coworkers, parents, siblings, or lover should be private until you share them. Prayer, meditation, and worship, for the most part, are private for many. Your afflictions, predilections, the medications you take, your medical history, ethnicity, sexual preference, and age should be private, until you decide to share them or are forced to for the sake of authentication, identification and security. And those discretions should be discriminately given (not forced to forfeit) on a case by case basis. You and you alone should be the arbiter on how you perceive yourself, and how your information gets disseminated, not other individuals or institutions that do it for profit, grown into multi-billion behemoths at your expense.

Collecting information about you without your consent is like chiseling a portion of you, in much the same way some cultures perceive the unapproved snapping of picture of you as stealing your soul. Those that argue that massive collection of information of individuals is for the purpose tailoring personalize advertising you would only be interested in, haven’t experienced the invasion of privacy on an intimate level. They based their assumptions, in part, on the percentage of the population who naively forfeit all of their private information for free content and services; and in part, through the plethora of information companies are already amassing on us through so many “trusted” mediums. While it appears that these assumptions may be true, the willingly forfeiture of information by those naive of the danger it leads us doesn’t justify the actions of companies siphoning information on the rest of us who have lived and prefer to retain their private lives.

The new corporate, libertarian technocrats and state’s agencies would have you believe that privacy is no longer a luxury we can afford given the state of security or ubiquitous nature of computers, internet, social media, and data collection necessary for very cheap or free services, i.e., the Internet of Things; “the genie is out of the bottle” as they say. They reason that if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t worry, or reason that “the constitution is a suicide pact.” The latter implying that the founders lived in different and less dangerous times not plagued with the problems we are currently facing today.

First, such reasoning tends to be uttered by those who have the financial means and power to insulate themselves from prying eyes, i.e., Mark Zuckerberg buying four houses around his home for privacy, or Facebook deleting information from their servers when force to hand over information for public scrutiny, or Eric Schmidt banning employees from talking to reporters for fear of disclosing personal information about Eric Schmidt. Bruce, 2015.

Second, just because we have something to hide doesn’t mean it’s illegal; keeping something personal from prying eye doesn’t imply guilt. No human is perfect, and everyone at one time or another has had an awkward moment, made a mistake, stumbled, embarrassed themselves and either had a fleeting fantasy about something or may not want to share their personal relationships with it anyone – there are many things we would like to keep privately, personally ours. It’s a prerogative and freedom that defines who we are as a democracy. Being imperfect is also what defines us as human beings, because without that imperfection, there is no impetus for psychological growth – from learning from our mistakes (with hubris, it’s a bit harder).

Third, the Founders lived in times of great uncertainty, having narrowly won their independence, and besieged with the responsibility of ensuring their new nation would succeed. They had to deal with a war debt and high inflation resulting from it; creating a new financial system and federal reserve bank; restoring trade and commerce with Europe; contending with localists who resented federalist powers while also contending with American settlers encroaching on Native American territories; disbanding their militia and re-establishing a new one, and there were more violence then because pretty much everyone was armed to the teeth – there was no gun control. These are only few examples of the many issues they had to deal with then. The founders may not have envisioned what sorts of dangers we faced today but at least they left a mechanism in place to deal with those unforeseen dangers, which worked well in the past when confronted with the threat or declaration of war. What they were concerned with were the inherent dangers from an uninformed citizenry forfeiting their rights for the sake of security or convenience. For you can fight a war against a common enemy (if the threat is truly imminent and obvious) that endangers your liberties, but how do you fight institutions (from within) that have been insidiously compromising those very same liberties? These are the ones we need to worry about, because they often dressed themselves as your benefactors, their true intentions hidden in the background of well-placed propaganda or products, services and protection they seek to provide.

Creating a culture of apathy towards the lack of privacy, or characterizing it as something very trivial, conditions us to accept surveillance, spying, and cyber stalking as the new norm, feel guilty or self-conscious about expressing concern over their intrusions, and censure or penalize us when we protest over their infringements. It’s naïve to think that the forfeiture of so much privacy is not leading us down a slippery slope. Besides being brainwashed, it makes us into conformist sheep (prey). There’s reason why our Founders incorporated the words, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” at the forefront of the declaration of independence. They were intimately aware of human avarice for what it was, and wanted to protect us from ourselves.

The new economy is driven by information. Yours. Collected without your awareness, or consent. Industries that didn’t adopt this business model, where left behind. And the new business models assume you don’t really own your information. You’re a means to an end, “bits” of information that can be sliced and diced into orderly metrics, exchanged and monetized for advertising; a stat to be targeted for products or services. Your information isn’t just trafficked for the purpose of targeting with you products or service, you also ended up being commoditized as the end product – not as what you really are, consumers and citizens. To keep your information from these databanks or public database requires money only the wealthy can afford. Ten to twenty public databases housing your information will land you in the top ten on most search engines. To remove yourself from these databases, will require you to forfeit more personal information (like your ip address, your location, your browsing history, etc.) for a fee (you have to register as a member), which is a form of extortion, to justify who you are, in order to opt-out your personal information from being published; and you’re never guaranteed that your information is ever purged from their databases – there are no auditing procedures because the data traffickers are not answerable to any regulatory body. Even reputation management firms require fees starting at $10,000 plus, well beyond the means of most citizens at the bottom tier of society. And they don’t necessarily guarantee results. Furthermore, with social media, unless you live in Europe or other countries (in Europe you can demand from Facebook the entire history of information they have on you, and Facebook is required by law to give it to you), pretty much all bets are off if you’re either referenced extensively by your digital extended networked or are the object of cyber harassment.

This economic model of information collection coupled with advertising seeks to control your behavior by getting you to react like Pavlovian dogs hungry for the next stimulus, to buy a product you wouldn’t ordinarily need or want as more of your information gets siphoned from every products, services and apps you use. Your preferences, the freedom of choice, held slave to the neurochemistry of the pleasure reward pathways by an industry well-versed in how to stoke them – social media has exploited this to the hilt. Your information, used to control your free will. Imagine a friend choosing for you what to eat or drink when you go out to dinner? When you go out shopping either at the supermarket or retail store, would you appreciate your friend (or worst, a stranger) choosing the things to buy because that person thinks they know you so well? Sure, advertising drives part of the economy, but it does so at great expense to our current and future liberties?

Do you really think social media giants, like Facebook, would be as big as they are if they weren’t selling users’ information? Now they can control information, censor it, manipulate people’s emotions ii. (either for or against something), and deny or deactivate accounts from those who may disagree with its policy, not to mention the fact that lives have been destroyed – either through suicide or murdered – through the propagation of false information, and Facebook has not compensated for those victims. Collateral damage as the result of the age we live in, a world imposed on us by those who have a limited view on how the world should work? Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s time to push back and hold these corporations to higher or different standards, one beholden not just to the users of their apps and services, but those in the periphery caught in the cross-hairs by these same apps.

Even worst is how information is mined by for deciphering patterns of behavior for the purpose of shaping them, sometimes aggregating individuals into strata of society, consequently limiting those individuals to a life prescribed by those labels. For the marginalized wanting to lift themselves from their plight, they’re force to accept a life of mediocrity and judgments resulting from those labels, their self-esteem and dignity under constant assault to ensure they stay in those predefined social strata. The outcomes from these classifications forces products and services they deemed you should buy or need, deny health insurance or jobs on the basis of your medical history, DNA profile or ethnicity, or slot you for certain schools, colleges or jobs on the basis of your associations, family history or where you live; or worst, the target of an investigation with surveillance (or an attack) for that very same association or for expressing dissent to either government’s overreach or companies’ policies. Your past constantly rehashed (or remashed by social media) compromises your future – and free will. These are only a few examples by which data analytics start out with the best of intentions, but like everything else, end up being exploited to their nefarious end. (Schneier, 2015). It took a long time for us to get where we are today. 911 was watershed moment, where we began losing certain freedoms for the sake of security. The digital age, however, has dramatically eclipsed that.

Forfeiting too much privacy for the sake convenience further drive us into a “surveillance capitalism” society ruled by libertarian technocrats, and powerful interests that influence government, whittling the remaining liberties we’ve taken for granted would be there in perpetuity, and was the basis from which this country was founded. iii. Though battle lines have been drawn between the privacy advocacy groups, i.e, quasi regulatory bodies (including civil liberties union) and the corporations and government agencies – certain guidelines are being pushed for more transparency and oversight – it’s not clear yet how this will unfold in the near future. iv1 Partly because, culturally we’ve accepted the notion that forfeiting privacy is for our benefit, and partly because power and influences are always disproportionately skewed in favor of the wealthy and the powerful interests (justice is not blind and congress has a revolving back door), and partly because the people for whom the privacy advocates intend to protect are complicit in that infringement through acquiescence resulting from the irresistible pull to be socially recognized and validated, and the sheer volume of information they unwittingly collect on behalf of the companies that provide them with “frictionless tools” designed to collect that information. Though you can attempt to rein-in some abuses by corporations and government agencies through legislation, congressional and judicial review, how do you control the person sitting next to you that snaps a picture of you, and posts it on social media with all sorts of information without your consent? If you’re a victim of a cyber-harassment, you have no control over the plethora of information that is constantly being amassed by these apps by those who abuse them.

Congress’s recent hearings of Facebook selling 70 million users’ information to Cambridge Analytica was barely a wakeup call (congress’s face-saving PR to justify their existence), because it didn’t address the magnitude of the problem, the unfettered access to your information without your consent. For example, upon authenticating who I was, eBay wanted to confirm the vehicles I had in my possession. They knew their license plates. I never gave this information to eBay. They purchased profiles of information on me, and combined it with theirs. And they get to re-sell it without my consent. When I went to their website to opt out of their publishing my information, there was no link to a privacy page; navigating to the privacy section took a customer phone call that took a half an hour to find where it was located (even the rep didn’t know where it was), and there exists no opt out function for publishing that information (anymore). Furthermore, their affiliates, like Paypal Credit, which is underwritten by a different financial institution, does not provide any mechanism to opt out of the data being share with non-affiliates, and can keep and share your data for 5 years after you’ve terminated an account with them. The days where institutions provide you an opt-out option for having your information published are dwindling fast. This is in stark contrast to the new regulatory laws in Europe. v.

The many infringements to your rights by institutions entrusted with your information underscore the need for alternative business models and platforms that respect privacy of its users, and compensate citizens when their information is used with their expressed permission. Congress truly needs to open a serious dialog about ways for companies to still make money without sacrificing citizen’s privacy as a means to an end, regulating it in a way that forces companies to acknowledge privacy for what it is: a fundamental liberty. It’s not a zero-sum game where privacy and product, services and security are mutually exclusive. Privacy has more intrinsic value to us as human beings than just being reduced it to an identity that gets processed into labels, judged, and peddled to a multitude of companies to be trafficked and “harvested” for their maximum value. We’re more than just the sum of our information. We’re self-aware, free thinking individuals, dynamically changing from moment to moment based on our experiences and environment, growing mentally, spiritually, and socially. We should have a right to mature, self-actualized by our ideals and have the freedom to change who we are when we feel like it. We should have full control over that, not decided for us. Balances should be struck where advertising revenue and profit can coexist with privacy and freewill, without compromising products, services, security, protection or privacy.

Perhaps in time, when disillusionment, activism and better business models reaches critical mass, the pendulum will swing the other way, redistributing some balance of power back in the hands where it belongs: the citizens. Perhaps, alternative business models like distributed ledgers such as blockchain technology or platforms like Etherium, MEWE, steemit, Informed Planet, DuckDuckgo, Blockchain Hub, etc. will woo a growing number of disenchanted citizenry away from institutions who have been abusing the privilege they were entrusted with.

After all, it’s the citizens, as consumers and taxpayers, who pay for both government and corporations to exist. Citizens are at the very foundation from which society stands, and where power is ultimately derived (“…deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.”). Perhaps alternative platforms like blockchain technology will awaken citizens to realize that poignant fact, providing us the “Blessing of Liberties” the founders intended us to have – in perpetuity.

"As society adapts to the digital age, we need to push back a bit and make the digital age adapt to us. On the one hand, technology, especially mobile devices, has built a whole new world of progress. On the other hand, devices have unintended and serious negative side effects, that we need to recognize and address if we are to maintain relationship with technology and retain our humanity.”

Space: Architect
Jose Selgas and Lucia Cano, Rohan

i. George Frederick Hegel, Introduction” to the Philosophy of Right, Encyclopedia Logic (= EL) §24, Zusatz (Z) 2.
ii. Facebook emotion experiment sparks criticism, BBC, 30 June 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28051930
iii. Surveillance Capitalism is what Shoshana refers to the new economic model, where humans as consumer “exists to be harvested…for behavioral data.” Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization, Journal of Information Technology, 30, no. 1 (March 2015): 75–89.
iv.The new privacy regulation goes in effect on May 25, 2018 in Europe, strengthens and gives control over privacy to individuals. iva. As of this writing, there’s been an uptick of institutions, such as Google, eBay, Twitter, and other companies making their private policy a little more transparent and clearer to users in response to the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).
v. The new privacy law General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect on May 25, 2018. “Companies that collect or mine personal data must ask users for consent. No longer will firms be able to bury disclosures about pervasive tracking in hard-to-read legal disclaimers.” https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2018/04/16/602851375/europe-s-sweeping-privacy-laws-prompt-new-norms-in-u-s