It is often important and helpful to formally define what we are talking about for everyone to be on the same page. Privacy is the ability to choose to express oneself selectively. It is the subtle distinction between what is morally acceptable between the bedroom, the bathroom, the dining table and the street. There are often things that we share with our friends/family over dinner which we would rather not share in public. Or, there might be things in our minds we would be embarrassed and even guilty to share with anyone else. This subtle distinction, when crossed could lead to undesirable consequences. For example, we would be okay finding ourselves naked in a shower but the same in a public place would be obnoxious.

This post is mostly about “digital privacy” and is used interchangeably. It is privacy in the digital age. Where technology and internet have made it extremely easy to infringe the our privacy. I will argue why we should care about our privacy, how (and by whom) it is being infringed, and what can you do about it.

The Why! Why should you care?

Most people ask me why they should care about their own privacy. It’s not like they have anything to hide. By definition (see above), this argument is flawed. Everyone has things to hide. The real question is from whom? As, things that we are okay with sharing with our beloved ones, we might not be willing to share with others. For example, nobody would agree to keep their houses unlocked (for others to come in and see), just because we have nothing to hide or you’re doing nothing wrong. You already care.

You might have nothing to hide, but you have something to fear

Most people do not realize the consequences of sharing things online or just allowing applications to access their information. If you are worried of keeping your house unlocked, you should as well be worried to let others into your life through your virtual windows. Applications are constantly tracking every single activity you do online. From, exactly how many milliseconds you look at a post, where exactly do you look on a picture, to how fast do you scroll through a post. Your every single interaction imaginable is being tracked by almost every modern application and is being stored permanently linking it to you. More of this is the How is your online privacy getting infringed section.

You might be taken out of context or misinterpreted

If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.

-Cardinal Richelieu

Privacy protects us from those who can misinterpret what we say, from those who maliciously want to harm us and from the powerful who want to abuse their power over us. Your personal preferences such as which flavor or ice cream you like might definitely be harmless but your political/religious believes could be used against you. You might be denied access to services, for example, your bank might deny you credit because you You might be denied from entering certain countries.

I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are.

Right to privacy

If you think privacy is unimportant for you because you have nothing to hide, you might as well say free speech is unimportant for you because you have nothing useful to say.

-Edward Snowden

Privacy speaks freedom

Humans are social beings. We care about what others think of us. We try to adjust our behavior depending on the social norms and others’ feedback. Imagine yourself in the middle of a busy street full of people. Would you be as free as you would be in your house all by yourself? Probably not. Not only humans change their behavior in others presence but also the possibility of someone being present changes our behavior. You are your true self when nobody’s looking and nobody could be looking; because you have the freedom to be so. You don’t have to constantly adjust yourself in the fear of being judged.

Privacy brings freedom. I am free to have my life private, to have a pay where I can go and be free of the judgmental eyes. I am free to allow whomever I want (or no one at all) to monitor me. To be able to live freely as if no one is looking. To be my true self.

That freedom is taken away when privacy is taken away ( for e.g., via surveillance). Institutions want to be in control and the most effective way of being in control is to take away freedom. To force compliance of social norms and orthodoxy. To brainwash the members into believing what they want them to believe.

Freedom is not worth having if it does not include freedom of making mistakes.

Mahatma Gandhi

End-to-end encryption is not enough

The content of your messages or calls might be unnessary for companies to track you. Metadata such as who you’re talking to, when, from where, for how long, etc are enough for companies. Researchers found that just a smartphone’s accelerometer data can reveal people’s location, passwords, body features, age, gender, level of intoxication, driving style, and can be used to reconstruct words spoken next to the device. Services like WhatsApp recently realized that people started to care about privacy and started to advertise their End-toEnd encrytion

How is your online privacy getting infringed

You are being tracked

We rely on various social media and other applications for our everyday life. But do you know that these applications are tracking every single activity you do not only when the application is running but all the time? Most of these applications such as Facebook are free to users. But then how come the company is worth billions of dollars? What do they actually sell?

A recent leak of Facebook’s database allows the private data to be misused by malicious indented actors 1.

Political propaganda

Nobody needs to justify why they “need” a right: the burden of justification falls on the one seeking to infringe upon the right.

-Edward Snowden

It is one thing that your Google search on

The world is full of ill-intended malicious people who wouldn’t mind destroying someone else’s life for their own benefit. All it takes is one mistake from innocent people being in the wrong place at the wrong time to screw them over.

Microsoft reports that 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals now do online research about candidates, often using information provided by search engines, social-networking sites, photo/video-sharing sites, personal web sites and blogs, and Twitter. They also report that 70 percent of U.S. recruiters have rejected candidates based on internet information.

Source

Your information may be used against you by your government in order to gain political power. Think about the social credit system. It is already being practiced in some countries. For e.g., let’s say your country implements it and starts surveilling on you 24x7 and as an open-minded individual, you enter a discussion with your peers and talk against some things your government has done recently. There is a good chance that because once-upon-a-time you raised your voice against the government, you are denied flight tickets for your next vacation.

This again brings up my point on personal freedom. Privacy speaks freedom. The ability to criticize the government is the exact thing that keeps them in check. Taking away that ability by penalizing free speech takes away our freedom and restricts us

What can you do about it?

Governments approve surveillance programs citing anti-terrorism and the question arises “security versus privacy”. Schneier argues that the real question should be liberty versus control2. He argues that foreign physical threat is as bad as …

The privacy paradox

Many people are indeed concerned about their privacy but behave as they didn’t. This is known as the privacy paradox.

Humans are social beings and we seek others’ approval. We have a need for others to know what we are doing, which is why we voluntarily publish information about us online. But as social beings, we also need to acknowledge that there are things which let our close ones, our psychologists, our physicians, our lawyers to know about us which we would never be willing others know. People easily say they don’t value privacy while their actions negate their belief.

Other reasons for the privacy paradox might be “finding it technologically difficult to take certain actions that disallow institutions to take advantage of it. Applications are purposefully designed to make it as difficult for a regular user as possible to care about their privacy by changing the default settings, which are often extracting as much of user’s personal data as possible. Most users do not have the knowledge and experience to protect themselves.

Who ? Government (5 eyes) Companies

Choose companies and services that are interested in their users’ privacy and take measures to advocate it. This website gives great alternatives to the daily applications we use everyday.

What can you do?

  • Use encryption everywhere

    How Strong Encryption Can Help Avoid Online Surveillance
  • Install https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere browser plugin
  • Change your default search engine to Duckduckgo on all browsers and start using it.
  • Avoid platforms which are notorious for privacy abuse.
  • Use Tor. Tor uses decentralized.
  • Tip: Use temp mail
  • Use OpenSource software. You can find opensource alternatives to almost every software. One example is Signal over Whatsapp
  • Visit privacytools.io and find alternatives to your everyday software.
  • Use tools like PrivacyBadger and UBlock Origin to block Ads and other stuff.
  • Encourage your friends and family to join the privacy preserving social media

Extreme:

  • Use Qubes OS with Whonix virtual machine (VM) which routes all your network traffic through Tor. Qubes can also sandbox applications in their own VM so that the application does not affect anything else outside their own sandbox VM. If you don’t want to install the complete OS, you can also use Whonix VM seperately.
  • Setup matrix network on your own server for secure, decentralized communication . Follow this guide
  • https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-analytics-opt-out/fllaojicojecljbmefodhfapmkghcbnh/related?hl=en

Closing thoughts

Book recommendation

To summarize, I would like to point you to the following TED talk which will hopefully fill-in the gaps I left unfilled.

References

  1. 533 million Facebook users’ phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online ↩

  2. The Eternal Value of Privacy ↩