Humans are nosey. Gathering information about those around us has always been valuable. It can keep us safer, help us get more resources, or be used as currency. People haven’t changed over millennia; only the scale and means of gathering information has.
I found this Motherboard piece on changes to European data privacy law and its conflicts with internet policy to be really interesting reading for professional reasons. The story points out that the personal information of domain registrants has traditionally been easily accessible, but this generates tension among those advocating for transparency and those advocating for privacy. On one hand, the information is a help for researchers, journalists and law enforcement. On the other, it's a treasure trove for hackers and spammers.
I work for a domain registrar, so this directly affects us, our partners, our customers, and the registries we work with.
It also puts global players’ interests directly at odds with one another, and I think situations like this between companies and governments, among governments or among companies — with us wee, yet lucrative, humans somewhere in the middle — are just getting started.
Companies like Google and Facebook have myriad ways of tracking us online and recording our preferences, activities, and relationships. Gathering information about other people and those they’re connected to has never been more valuable.
It raises big, complicated questions about who should have influence and control over policy and practice online regarding people’s privacy. From a western, individualist perspective, many would say that each person should get to dictate how private their presence is, and how their activities and data can or can’t be accessed.
Realistically, it can’t really be handled that way. One of the main issues is that most people don’t really have a clue: how it works, what companies know (or can find out) about them, how that data can be used, and how to adjust access to their information.
More fundamentally, people don’t care. The ins and outs of terms and conditions, end-user licence agreements, policies, regulations, cookies, trackers, and cross-platform data mining are super complicated and really boring, unless perhaps that’s the industry you work in.
Most folks just want to see what their friends have been posting, get ever-speedier Amazon Prime delivery, or get access to the latest app. Whatever it takes. What do you need? Facebook login? Credit card details? Mother’s maiden name? Sure, here you go.
Even when they’re victimized, many people still don’t change their passwords or use two-factor authentication, and keep clicking on “What kind of X are you?” quizzes with no clue how much access to their accounts that they’re handing over.
Is it up to companies or governments to protect people in spite of themselves? And to what degree? Is there a point at which liability becomes yours simply due to your own stubborn negligence or incompetence? (At one point insurance companies could deny claims for items stolen from your car if the doors hadn’t been locked …)
The current tensions regarding who gets access to our online lives and what they get to do with that data centres mainly around two players: government and big corporations. Governments’ interest is more control-centric, and corporations’ interest is more revenue-centric. I’m not sure either has our best interests at heart.
So does that leave us as the sole champions of our own privacy? Even when, as noted, most people only pay lip service to securing it? And when companies and governments have been caught circumventing their own rules regarding it ...
What we are paying attention to, though, is media, and we’re more influenced than we tend to realize. But how does that relate to online privacy?
Our all-access media culture has trained us in the idea that we have (or should have) 24/7 access to whatever we want to know. About whomever we want to know about, celebrities being the most obvious examples.
In this age of the 24-hour news cycle and social media commentary saturation, famous people aren’t really human anymore. They are stalked like gazelles on the veldt so we can learn everything about them. And it’s okay to say anything you want about them in public.
Rights to privacy? But the people want to know! It’s like somehow access to other’s information has been warped into notions of the greater public good. Now, who would that attitude serve well?
But the dehumanization online has, inevitably, trickled down from celebrities. Everyone is fair game for behaviour we would be unlikely to engage in face-to-face, whether it’s rooting through someone’s personal possessions or saying horrible things.
Looking at hacked and stolen photos isn’t the same (or as bad/creepy/weird) as peeping in someone’s windows. Mining millions of people’s metadata isn’t the same as listening in directly on their phone calls.
A twisted hierarchy of offence develops. But who gets to say what is and isn’t allowed? And who doles out punishment? Currently response is almost exclusively reactive and generally in response to public outrage.
When so little of privacy is considered sacred anymore — especially online — over time it sinks in and introduces a sort of learned helplessness.
Once you know what you can find out about others, and what can and has been learned about you and your activities, the notion of trying to protect your privacy starts to seem impossible, and thus pointless. And if nothing really bad has happened because of it to date, should you even care?
This goes for potentially our entire online and offline existence, not just for this app login or that ecommerce account. Once you relinquish rights to, and demand for, privacy standards, that horse ain’t going back in the barn.
We basically need an overarching concept of privacy. Everyone’s entitled to a basic, decent level of privacy, and the ability to grant or deny access to their identity and activities, which is much harder to weasel around. Privacy neutrality, essentially. (Good luck selling that notion across countries, cultures, and corporations …)
Of course, given how beleaguered net neutrality is these days, I don’t see privacy neutrality becoming the norm any time soon. It’s contrary to the interests of both governments and big companies. And let’s face it, we, the average Joes, aren’t really walking the walk, either.
We absolutely need to send clear messages to those powerful entities about what’s none of their business. We also need to start rewiring ourselves regarding what’s none of our business.
M-Theory is an opinion column by Melanie Baker. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Communitech. Melle can be reached on Twitter at @melle or by email at me@melle.ca.
