Privacy as Data Protection for the Individual

“If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

This lazy, outdated crutch seems to have been subconsciously fed to a large portion of the Western world to pacify and to explain away the need for concern over the surveillance of their own lives. Not only is it an inadequate device for fulfilling its intended purpose, but it’s also completely and provably untrue.

It’s a phrase most often repeated by those who are unconcerned to take even the most basic steps to protect their own privacy. It assumes that everyone’s lives must be as insubstantial or as inconsequential as theirs presumably are, as they can’t imagine, not even for the sake of discussion, that anyone could have any valid reason to want to protect their own privacy without being some kind of criminal or falling foul of acceptable social norms.

“Just because I don’t have anything to hide doesn’t mean I have everything to show.”

This article is an attempt at a general response to this attitude and all the claims made within it. For the sake of communication in good faith, I’ll give these people the benefit of the doubt here; maybe they genuinely can’t think of a single example of casual, everyday, non-criminal people requiring varying levels of privacy. After some consideration of this, here is a short list of examples I’ve put together:

1 — Personal exchanges with significant others, family members, etc. This also goes for heated discussions, disagreements or arguments you might be having where emotional influence is high, and, of course, “intimate exchanges”. A great deal of people wouldn’t want these intimate exchanges made public and to become the subject of scrutiny by their friends, families and co-workers. In that same vein, people often say a lot of things they don’t necessarily mean when they’re in the middle of an argument, or just things that would sound bad when taken out of context.

As Douglas Murray once pointed out, “it’s a kind of dystopian nightmare that someone would be forever known for their worst joke or for what they said at their lowest, crassest moment.”

As imperfect human beings, we often have to go through things in order to overcome them. This also goes for how we behave and communicate with the people around us. As we grow, we often have to make mistakes in order to understand how they were made, so that we can be sincere in never making them again. At least, that’s the optimistic outcome.

Exposure of someone’s text and/or social media messages, especially when taken out of context, can sometimes be enough to end friendships, to cause lasting damage to families, to bring about suspicion among co-workers, etc.

2 — As a writer of fiction for many years, I’ve often found myself typing some pretty strange things into search engines. As clear as day, I remember some twelve-fifteen years ago, I typed into Google something like “common mistakes murderers make when disposing of dead bodies,” and stopped for a moment before hitting enter, for some reason nervous about whether or not that search would bring any real-world consequences down on my life. By this point, I’ve searched for what must be at least a thousand different queries across many different subjects, any one of which could, at best, result in some judgmental stares and remarks of disgust from people who might see them.

3 — Medical problems are personal and often embarrassing. There are also a great deal of psychological variables going into whether or not someone will even admit to themselves the possibility that they might be suffering from a certain medical issue, let alone admitting it to others. Searching for information regarding medical problems obviously requires some level of privacy, and, quite often, people aren’t even searching for information that’s relevant to themselves. It’s just as likely that they know someone suffering from a medical issue and wish to be educated on how to help deal with the symptoms should the need arise, or perhaps they’ve just read about someone suffering from a certain issue online and wanted to find out more as a passing interest.

4 — “Stop looking at my phone!” — I’m sure most of us are familiar with this one in one sense or another. I’ve actually “used” this one on a friend of mine who thinks that privacy is basically non-existent and talking about it is a superficial waste of time. Acting deliberately (and suspiciously) nosey, I made a point of having him catch me looking at his phone while he was using it. He instantly protected his screen. After a bit of back-and-forth, I half-mockingly told him he had an unrecognised interest in protecting his own privacy. During that back-and-forth, I asked him why he didn’t want me looking at his phone. “Because it’s none of your business,” he said, and he was damn right. He had made my point for me, although he will go to the grave without ever giving me the satisfaction of letting me know it.

This brings me to number 5. This same friend has recently taken on an interest into Cryptocurrency.

5 — Financial information. Whether you have anything to hide or not seems to be become a blurry issue here. A lot of people, for a diverse host of reasons, don’t like to share everything about their finances. Most of us wouldn’t ever want to go scanning people’s bank statements without their consent and without a damn good reason.

Perhaps it’s just human pride and/or humility. Perhaps they buy things — innocent and legal things — that they don’t want everyone knowing about. Perhaps they are subscribed to services that there’s just no practical reason to ever tell someone. “Money is always a dirty subject,” someone once told me, and while I can’t agree to that as an absolute, I can definitely recognise its relevance here.

As for Cryptocurrency, it’s important to point out that most crypto protocols operate with an open ledger, where each wallet can be inspected and where every transaction can be tracked and traced. Most, but not all.

6 — Whistleblowers.

7 — An unfortunate percentage of the population of the world still live under tyrannical and oppressive political/religious regimes. Statements can be mistaken and misconstrued as criticisms of a perfect State, or heresy against an infallible religious elite, leading to varying degrees of punishment. Under these regimes, people are often not even safe confiding in their families and friends, as their minds have been caught and consumed by the propaganda and indoctrination. These people require full privacy and protection of their own minds, as, in many cases, a breach of that could lead to exile from their families and homes, loss of livelihood, imprisonment, torture or death.

There is also an unfortunate percentage of the populations of the so-called free world who hold viewpoints — whether those views are “right” or “wrong” is irrelevant here — that they foresee may be “outlawed” when the political pendulum inevitably swings.

The simple fact alone that any of these people fear for their lives because of what they think (whether or not they even believe what they think; they could just be exploring trains of thought) is often more troublesome than the contents of their thoughts themselves.

8 — The business of advertising doesn’t have the cleanest history, nor do current marketing experts merely wish to advertise the practical/healthy aspects of their products to you. There are various kinds of “tricks” that are utilised in advertising, from the most basic “make it $4.99 so the customers don’t think it’s 5 bucks,” to the slightly more manipulative “buy this product to make yourself feel good,” all the way up to the idea that these advertisers are selling lifestyles and happiness itself, rather than just products.

It has become commonly known that advertisers buy personal data in order to target ads, and I’m sure we all know someone who’s been a bit unsettled by the appearance of online ads for products they’ve just been discussing with someone two feet away from them, shortly after their discussion ended.

(I was conflicted about whether or not to leave this one in, but I think these agencies and practices are worth a mention.)

9 — Human beings are corruptible. We are also largely opportunistic, and this can be to our detriment just as it can be to our benefit. What kinds of people are being appointed to do the jobs of monitoring online discussions, of capturing audio and video data of interpersonal exchanges, of patrolling the thoughts of their friends and neighbours? First and foremost, they are human. They are subject to an endless stream of influences and conditioned impulses, even those generated within their own minds.

There have been endless cases of “overseers” of all kinds; political, religious, corporate, even individuals like hackers and so on, becoming personally involved with the people they have been covertly monitoring. The opportunities for stalking, blackmailing, harassing, etc., go through the roof. Corporate and political figures can be corrupted by threat of exposure of personal intimate details to the detriment of entire populations.

Power corrupts, and unfortunately, despite our advanced technology and our ever-evolving understanding of the natural world, we still neglect mastery over our own behaviour all-too-often.

These are just a few examples, personal and societal, of the need for privacy in our day-to-day lives.

In the age of Big Tech and with the prevalence of social media, the potential dangers of not protecting your own data are slowly becoming more obvious. And with constant identity theft, server hacks, data leaks, and guides that are being forever refined and tools that make these malicious activities as easy as a few clicks of the mouse, it’s simply becoming too risky to not take some concern over privacy.

Alongside that, the divisive state of ideologically-driven human beings is bringing the concept of Thought Crime all-too-close to accepted reality. Whether you think it’s justified or not, moral or not, necessary or not, the fact is that attitudes in society tend to shift, and we can never truly be sure who will be next to be persecuted for what they think, nor for what ill-thought-out justification. This is something I will be exploring in another piece of writing.

A lot of people might be content to outsource their privacy-protection needs to government and corporate policy, and these people also tend to be those who pay very little mind to “data protection” until it’s far too late. At its most basic level, that’s all privacy is: data protection for the individual. That need doesn’t stop with digital data. In fact, it doesn’t even begin there.

Personally, I’m a very private person. I don’t like people knowing where I am at all times nor what I’m doing, even if it’s something as simple as going out to play pool or staying in to watch films or podcasts. This is a very simple level of privacy, but it also extends to times I might go away for a week or two. There have been many cases of people posting pictures of their family holiday on social media, only to return home to find their house broken into and their valuables missing. This can still happen to me when I go away, but the near-effortless steps I take to protect my own privacy in this case makes it significantly less likely.

The Snowden leaks exposed to the public entire surveillance infrastructures spanning across continents and capturing all kinds of information across a range of devices. Virtually all forms of communication and social media technology were being tapped by these infrastructures, confirming, finally, what the most suspicious of us had been saying for decades: Big Brother is watching.

Now that this claim could not be pushed aside and denounced as baseless conspiracy theory, many tired, careless people could only default to saying one final thing in order to not have to exert any extra effort to protect their own information: “if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

Every tyrant loves it, and is counting on the prevalence of such lazy cop-outs from people who just want to go along to get along, in order to fulfil the goals of their agendas.

“Privacy isn’t about something to hide. Privacy is about something to protect. And that’s who you are. That’s what you believe in. That’s who you want to become. Privacy is the right to the self. Privacy is what gives you the ability to share with the world who you are on your own terms.” — Edward Snowden.

In conclusion, it’s easy for some to overlook privacy as data protection for the individual when it’s confined to the context of digital data. As has been shown repeatedly and explored here in summary, the potential damaging consequences for doing so can be long-lasting and even irreversible, and are not limited to the digital world. Government and corporate policy that is intended to protect privacy is mostly inadequate and made obsolete in the face of emerging technology. What’s more, these institutions are all-too-often complicit in privacy violations on every level.

And, contrary to what some people think, becoming conscious about your own privacy need not make you anxious, paranoid, nor does it mean you have to live the life of a hermit. Some simple steps can be taken both offline and on to protect the information you decide to share.

As for online, here are some suggestions:

1 — Visit a website such as privacytools.io or prism-break.org to find privacy-focused alternatives to popular apps and software you often use.

2 — Consider investing in a decent VPN and don’t use the internet without it. I’ve only used 2 myself (AirVPN and ProtonVPN) but haven’t experienced significant loss of speed nor lag on either. If nothing else, it’ll just add a layer of protection between you and any hackers and data-miners you might cross paths with.

3 — If you donate to any political causes which may bring any kind of trouble to your doorstep now or in the future, insist that they open up channels to start accepting some form of anonymous cryptocurrency. There are quite a few to choose from (Monero, Dero, Piratechain, etc.) and in the future, there will be more.

4 — Consider the content you share online. Text, pictures, video — are you offering up any information that could be used by someone else to violate your privacy or that of anyone else involved in your content?

5 — There are many privacy-oriented communities online. If you have even the slightest interest in what’s being written about here, consider checking in with them from time to time. I’d bet that it’s almost impossible to spend an hour in any of them and not find something that’s relevant to you personally. Reddit is not a privacy-centred social platform, but the subreddit /r/privacy has collated lists of information and other websites and resources along it’s sidebar. It can be a useful starting point, if nothing more.