Since the start of the Privacy Project, the most common response I have gotten from readers is a request for some kind of solution. Theyre slightly freaked out and hoping for tips to shore up their digital hygiene or for a guide that might help them navigate the internet without giving away their personal data. For months Ive included a Tip of the Week feature for this very reason, but Ive always felt conflicted about it, because the hard truth is that our data is leaking and trading all the time, in places we might not even know to look. Each privacy tip you follow is undoubtedly helpful (and you should follow them!), but its a bit like a single sandbag in a hurricane: You need to amass so, so many and be extremely vigilant to make a difference.

I have argued previously that the personal-responsibility frame for privacy is unfair. And I believe that the only way to fully transform privacy is if data protection moves from individuals to institutions. But that said, I was moved over the holiday weekend by an argument that gave me a bit of hope that there are small ways we individuals can make a difference.

The idea came from the writer Dave Eggers. In an interview with Voxs Ezra Klein, Eggers who doesnt have Wi-Fi in his home and still uses a flip phone makes the argument that our public demand for more and more information plays a meaningful role in the privacy discussion:

We cant just blame the Big Five [Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon] and the surveillance they do and the N.S.A., because we are constantly using these tools on each other and thinking its O.K. Whether its getting email receipts, whether its parents surveilling their kids, even at college. Whether its spouses surveilling each other through their smartphones all the spying people do on each other. People surreptitiously taking photos of each other because its so easy now and you always have a high-level camera in your hands. I think that we dont necessarily realize how quickly weve evolved and how quickly we have superseded our idea of our right to privacy by our right to know.

He continues:

Weve evolved to the point where our ideas of privacy have evolved or our value of it is almost completely gone. I think theres a few square feet and our skulls that we still retain. Theres the bathroom, the bedroom after a certain hour and theres the space in our brain. But nowhere else do we expect privacy. And I think thats a radical shift in evolution, and it happened in a few years.

There are bits in the larger conversation that I disagree with Eggers on, mostly because I think it offers too much cover for Big Tech. I think his argument that theres a public market for privacy-invading services and that tech companies are merely responding to it and building products is a backward interpretation. Id argue that its human behavior thats responding to powerful, addictive products and well-crafted marketing campaigns. Regardless, I think theres something poignant about this line: We have superseded our idea of our right to privacy by our right to know.

Writing about technology for roughly a decade, Ive felt this strongly at times. I noticed it first watching Reddit threads after a mass shooting in 2012 inside a movie theater in Aurora, Colo. a kind of online vigilante detective emerged, powered by the idea that almost any piece of information could be found and that, by virtue of being online, we were entitled to it. Since then, the behavior has embedded itself into the dark soul of the internet. The hunt for the Boston bombers, Gamergate, the 4chan culture of doxing some of it is predicated on a behavior to want information that, 15 years ago, we might not have felt entitled to.

Link:
We No Longer Expect Privacy. You Can Change That. - The New York Times