Tapestries-14 | Privacy isn’t just dead, it’s irrelevant
Terminology is important, and we need to move the discussion about data away from ‘privacy.’
Photo by Matthew Henry
I’ve been considering the notion of ‘privacy’ for some time, and just finished a book that helped crystallize my thinking.
The book in question was James Gleick’s The Information, about the history of…information. An early paragraph about the nature of progress really struck me. In relation to the evolving discipline of physics, Gleick comments that:
[it] could not proceed until Isaac Newton appropriated words that were ancient and vague — force, mass, motion and even time — and gave them new meanings… Until then, motion…covered a peach ripening, a stone falling, a child growing, a body decaying. That was too rich. Most varieties of motion had to be tossed out before Newton’s laws could apply and the Scientific Revolution could succeed.
Using this example, Gleick clarifies that definitions, terminology and fit-for-purpose concepts are all essential elements of technological progress. Reading this paragraph, it occurred to me that we’re using the wrong terminology to discuss one of the 21st century’s greatest challenges: privacy in the digital age.
I believe we are at an impasse in discussing digital ‘privacy,’ because it is an obsolete concept. I don’t intend on proposing a variety of solutions. I simply want to more clearly state the problem, to enable the conversation to progress. I hope you read it this way; let’s jump in.
Definitions and common usage
The word ‘private’ originates in ancient Greece and derives from the Latin privatus, meaning ‘withdrawn from public life’. The world has changed a lot in the last two millennia, but until 20 years ago, the concept of privacy could be understood by two people living hundreds of years apart.
When I think of privacy, the first thing that comes to mind is my apartment. When I walk into my apartment each evening, I finally have some physical and mental space to myself, away from the office, meetings, subways, buildings, events, restaurants, Ubers or cafes where I spend my days. In my apartment, I can open up to my girlfriend, play music of questionable quality, sleep, call my family or walk naked to the shower. They are things I don’t feel comfortable doing in public. To me, this is ‘privacy’.
While this is my personal experience of privacy, I feel it’s sufficiently universal to lay the groundwork for this piece.
Our changing relationship with the internet
Per above, privacy refers to the ability to operate in a space of our own away from prying eyes. Using this definition, we can make an important distinction between privacy in our daily lives and ‘privacy’ on the internet: compared to the 1:1 interface between our physically public and private lives, there is no tangible, direct relationship with the ‘internet’. Everything we do online is through an intermediary, whether a network, company or ISP.
The ‘inside / outside’ concept that is central to traditional privacy does not fit the online paradigm. If I want privacy in my apartment, I lock the door and close the blinds. That mechanism doesn’t exist online. Once data has been transmitted from the offline to online world, it is endlessly re-packaged and bounced around by faceless intermediaries.
Taking Gleick’s insight one step further, even the concept of being ‘on the internet’ has become obsolete. It applied when we had to log onto a desktop browser, but we are now ‘on the internet’ 24/7 as our smartphones are always ‘on’, tracking our every activity and movement while we’re awake and asleep. The internet has no ‘when’, the internet now ‘is’.
The words we use to describe our world are very important. We need to acknowledge that ‘privacy’ on the internet and even the concept of being ‘on the internet’ are both useless constructs that stop us from moving forward. We are stuck striving for a virtue that doesn’t actually exist.
Clues that something ain’t right
People equate digital privacy with traditional privacy, where the threshold is doing things you don’t want others to see, and there’s nothing most of us do when browsing that crosses this boundary (most of the time). Therefore, when confronted with the reality that we’ve lost control of our ‘privacy’, many people respond ‘but I’ve got nothing to hide’. This is a symptom of the terminology-problem.
Let’s look at a historical analogy. Later in the book, Gleick gives an example of adaption to technological change, during the introduction of the telegraph in the 19th century:
In this time of conceptual change, mental readjustments were needed to understand the telegraph itself. Confusion inspired anecdotes, which often turned on awkward new meanings of familiar terms: innocent words like send… there was the woman who brought a dish of sauerkraut into the telegraph office in Karlsruhe to be ‘sent’ to her son in Rastatt.
I believe we’re experiencing a form of technological-whiplash; we’re disoriented. In this confused state, we’re clinging onto a quaint concept of ‘privacy’ in a data-driven world. We are all that lady, banging on about privacy in a time that has moved passed it as a concept. In some ways, striving for privacy (as broadly understood) on the internet is just as sensible as sending fermented cabbage via telegraph.
If ‘privacy’ was truly the right concept, we wouldn’t spend our lives in front of Alexa and Siri, and host them in our most intimate spaces. If ‘privacy’ was the real issue, we wouldn’t ask Google all the intimate things we do. We inherently understand that we’ve given something away, but haven’t yet articulated that it’s not ‘privacy.’ We give away data; privacy was a casualty before the war began.
A path forward: Value transfer
Data is indeed the new oil; it is an incredibly valuable commodity. At last check, the combined market capitalization of Google, Facebook and Amazon was ~$2.6 trillion. At the risk of an enormous over-simplification, this is a very rough proxy for the future value of the personal data these three companies hold on all of us (at least the value the market ascribes). We may only be individual users of these networks, but our aggregate value is immense and growing.
To be clear, the issue the conversation around data ‘privacy’ seeks to address is incredibly important, because those who hold data, hold power. I am writing this piece because we fail to address the real issues — who owns what, what constitutes responsible use, what should be shared — because we’re focused on a concept that is a dead-end for constructive discussion.
If we frame the problem as a ‘privacy’ issue, I don’t begrudge people responding with ‘I’ve got nothing to hide’. But if we frame it as a value transfer issue, we may get a different reaction.
What if this is how we framed the issue:
Say what you want about ‘privacy’, but what about ‘fairness’? Google, Facebook and Amazon are getting fabulously rich off data they hold about you. How do they get it? You give it to them for free! Your interests, desires and curiosities are yours, so why are the world’s biggest technology companies pocketing all that cash by selling your avatars to the highest bidders?
To move the discussion about data rights and ‘privacy’ forward, we should focus on the economics. Just as Bernie Sanders has strengthened his platform by railing against inequality and the enormous accumulation of wealth, those fighting for data ‘privacy’ should focus on the enormous accumulation of wealth by the world’s largest technology companies, at the expense of individuals.
To my mind, an appeal to people’s wallets — not to the unfit concept of digital ‘privacy’ — represents a more effective way of generating interest in the discussion and creating real traction.
Bringing it together
Continuing the political analogy, I’d like to end with a comment on Andrew Yang. One of the reasons for Yang’s outsize-success and cult-like following, was his ability to bring a fresh perspective to challenging and important problems.
One of his ideas included a ‘data dividend’, requiring technology companies to issue users a dividend as an acknowledgement of the value of their data; it is a way to transfer some value from the incumbent data barons to the people actually providing their data. I heard about this policy towards the end of researching this piece, and it’s clearly one I agree with.
I raise it for two reasons: Firstly, a ‘data dividend’ is a useful option to explore for reasons described above. But as I stated at the beginning, this piece is intended to assist in accurately stating the problem; discussing all available paths forward is beyond its scope.
Secondly, and more importantly, Yang and the success of his fresh ideas provide an important lesson. He struck a cord with voters because he provided a new way of thinking about old problems.
Clearly identifying a problem, with appropriate language and concepts, is the first step towards solving it, and both Gleick and Yang provided me with interesting applications of this idea. I hope this piece is read as an extension of that approach, and helps us move the important discussion about data forward.