This is the voice of anti-privacy, the means by which governments, corporations and tech platforms persuade us to hand over levels of personal information unthinkable until very recently. It’s a voice that’s got louder and more insistent as those in control of our data have realised that digitalisation opens the door to previously undreamed-of levels of money and power.
Maybe, like me, you’ve become somewhat immune to that voice and hear both desperation and the desire to dominate in its tones. You’ve already had worrying glimpses of the uses to which your personal information could be put and you can see how, collected en masse and harnessed to new state powers, public data could create a system of control never before seen on earth. At the same time, you hear the whisperings of the anti-privacy voice around you as your fellow citizens repeat its casuistic deceptions. Sometimes it sounds like Mephistopheles offering a deal: “If you supply Google with data, we’ll give you a free email… if you get a loyalty card, you can pay ‘member’s prices’… if you install a smart meter, we might reduce your energy bills.”
The sibilant voice of anti-privacy masks the curious inversion that is taking place. Since the earliest days of the internet, we’ve been told to protect our data from bad actors such as financial scammers, hackers, identity thieves and geopolitical baddies. We are repeatedly warned against giving personal information unless we are absolutely sure who will be using it and how. We’ve been urged to abide by GDPR, put privacy policies on our websites and use tools such as Virtual Private Networks to encrypt our data. Apple, my laptop provider of choice since the early 2000s, has made privacy central to its brand, with protections built into its operating systems and a policy of not selling data to third parties.
Yet suddenly we’re being told we must hand over personal information to organisations linked to networks of unknown parties. There’s talk of restrictions on VPNs to stop people from getting round the identity checks necessary for a ban on social media for children. Such restrictions would only apply to ordinary citizens: since most organisations use VPNs, it would be privacy as usual for government bodies. This fact makes the terms of the new deal crystal clear: what’s ours is theirs and what’s theirs remains their own....<<<Read More>>>...
