Why This Privacy?

The Current State of Privacy

Over the last decade, legislators have started initiatives to protect privacy, which resulted in GDPR and similar regulations worldwide aimed at protecting people. The first visible result was the rapid flood of annoying cookie pop-ups on nearly every website, which few people understood. Those regulations also meant huge changes to the big ad-tech companies, which now had to inform users about their data usage and allow users to opt-out of many of the company's sources of income. It is not a big surprise, then, that they became very vocal about these changes and started to present their vision of the world. A vision, where "if you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to hide", and privacy is a modern caprice serving no real purpose. A vision, in which people willingly give up their privacy for better-targeted ads. On top of that, governments worldwide promote the "privacy vs security" narrative, as if they were mutually exclusive.

In our experience, people seem tired with this topic altogether. Almost everyone we spoke with recently says they highly value privacy, but they would not pay a subscription fee to move from a free platform to a paid, privacy-friendly one. They would not give up any functionality, like customised stickers in a messaging application, if that was the cost of a move to a private service. They do not pay attention to what their favourite party says about privacy. It is a hot topic, but apparently not hot enough for many people to be personally involved. We suspect (and hope) this is because people do not understand why privacy is important. The discussion is often steered into such narratives:

- lack of privacy means that burglars might know when we are not at home,

- employers would know if we are cheating about our sick leave,

- criminals could steal our identity and e.g. take a consumer credit in our name,

- generally no one wants to be stalked or watched e.g. while sitting on a toilet.

The above reasons are all true, but they are far from the main reason. Similarly to "greenwashing", ad-tech led narrative is trying to convince us to focus only on these issues. Then, they would introduce extra security measures to prevent us from these risks, while allowing them to keep their business model as it is. That is why we are now going to look at why the privacy really matters.

Why Privacy Is Important

Privacy is the main tool to protect our personal freedom. We need to protect our freedom for two main reasons:

1. We are not all the same. It is not possible to be liked by everyone. The more we try, the more we loose our authenticity, and consequently, happiness. However, publicly being authentic may put us at risk of severe repressions.

2. The natural goal of a society is to be as effective as possible, so that it can survive the competition against other societies, their economies and armies. People would like to live in a happy society, but society as a mechanism is only driven by its efficiency and nothing else. These two goals sometimes provide similar outcomes and are commonly assumed as a single goal, but they are not the same. If we, as people, want to live in a happy society, we must intentionally and proactively employ complex mechanisms to achieve it. Democracy is the most obvious such a mechanism, while privacy is one of the essential tools to support it.

The System of Pressures and Repressions

Privacy removes pressure to do things we disagree with, specifically from people and organisations we depend on:

1. "Personal supply chain", like shops. It is not unheard of for some service providers to reject customers based on their beliefs or political views. Many Western countries have regulations which ban this behaviour, but privacy may serve as an even more effective counter measure than such a ban.

2. Employers want to protect their brand and as part of doing so, they will happily sack (or not hire) employees who might put it at risk because of their views. From the employer's perspective it is ideal when employees do not hold any controversial views and are generally not involved on any side of any conflict, as it would potentially mean that someone might see their brand in a negative light. An extra twist is that people are often unwilling to admit they chose the conformist way. Clashing with this contradiction, they may defend views they do not actually hold to avoid appearing hypocritical. (As a side note, we suspect that similar manipulative mechanism happened with Gmail: at the beginning everyone thought that Gmail was not snooping on us, and then when we slowly learned that it does, everyone pretended that it is a normal thing.)

3. Credit rating agencies have a huge lever to impact our behaviour. And the ideal profile of a good consumer is one who never makes any problems. Not even when they are right. Ideal consumer just consumes what is given to them, politely. Such a consumer is risk-free, while other consumers might potentially get into some trouble and then have problems with paying back the installments. This type of pressure is significant yet seldom discussed. One which comfortably lives under the cover of "fraud prevention" - who dares to question that?

4. Family, friends, and local communities sometimes choose to use intimidation as a supplement to their meritocratic arguments in political or religious discussions. It does not take a lot of imagination to see a village where admitting to voting on a specific political party is like asking to be exiled. This is one of the reasons why elections are better when they remain secret. What is more, it is not enough to only allow people to keep their votes private. It is better to not give any option to disclose such a vote. Otherwise not disclosing one's vote voluntarily would be assumed as probably "having something to hide". This is one of the reasons why e.g. posting pictures of our own poll cards is illegal in most Western countries.

5. States sometimes want to know if we are good citizens, or maybe if we are thinking about protesting. There are plenty of examples, from obvious Russia, Belarus and Iran to Hong-Kong, China and many others, in modern cases using automatic face recognition technologies to automate the repression against protesters at a mass scale. Tracing participation in protests is just one example, but in some of the above countries it also counts which books people are reading, or which people they communicate with via messaging applications.

Inhibition

As mentioned in our article:

one aspect of happiness is joy, which can only be attained spontaneously. A good way to invite it is by creating an environment similar to those in which it has already spontaneously occurred in the past. Trying to find common traits of such environments yields many different aspects, but one particular trait that comes to mind is the feeling of safety - a space in which we can relax. It seems natural that the feeling of privacy is an important factor in such a state, and numerous studies [2] support this approach. Lack of privacy leads to a feeling of lack of control, and consequently, anxiety and stress. People tend to react with self-censorship and inhibition when they are aware of being under surveillance, such as being constantly listened to by smart speakers that continuously send recordings to their providers' remote servers. Such an environment is unlikely to be favourable for spontaneous joy.

Quoting Data Without Context

Another problem is that data taken out of context can easily be misunderstood: we speak differently with family and friends than we do with the public. It is not necessarily because we lie to the public. It is because friends know a lot more context and are not looking to twist our meaning, so we do not need to be as cautious. Public does the opposite, so our public profile can be easily misrepresented in a bad light. We need privacy to protect from it too - otherwise that information could be used to blackmail, make pressure, or worst - have a chilling effect on all of our friendly discussions - just in case if they were to be taken out of context. We can often find covertly recorded videos of politicians having a good time with their friends, which accidentally leak to the internet and are widely discussed by the public, as if it was completely adequate.

Fighting Different Views

Another problem is exposing our vulnerabilities to our opponents; for example, political opponents can be tracked to find compromising material to blackmail them. At Complicated World, we see different views and tensions between them as inevitable and natural. If we want to live in a happy society we should make sure that we make space for that, rather than trying to finally find one consensus and pretending that everyone agrees with each other (like it is happening in China [1]). As part of helping opposition (political, cultural, trade union) to exist, it requires protection, and privacy is the primary ingredient of such a protection. What is more, its existence requires everyone to participate. Even if we just happen to agree on everything with the mainstream, we will still benefit in the long term from creating space for different views, because one day we will be in some minority too.

Being Exposed to Manipulations

It is much easier to manipulate people if we get to know them. Multiple research [3] shows that machine learning algorithms need to know as few as 200-300 "likes" to be better at predicting a person's future behaviour than their spouse or any family member. Equipped with such knowledge, some organisations specifically crafted ads in such a way to be very suggestive to particular recipients. Are you scared of immigrants? A political party will use them as a weapon to tell you that their opponents are all about bringing them in unlimited numbers. Are you in favour of allowing immigrants in? That very same party will bombard you with material of how they support immigrants. A taste of that was documented after analysis of Brexit campaign and Donald Trump presidential campaign in 2016. We should expect plenty more, which goes under the radar and is difficult to spot. We are grateful to Christopher Wylie for being a whistleblower and allowing us to learn about this particular case - otherwise it might go undetected. Political manipulations are perhaps the most dangerous kind, but think about the plenty of "almost harmless" ads which are convincing you that not buying their latest product means staying behind and loosing esteem.

Strictly Protected Types of Data

Our health data is particularly valuable as a potential predictor of someone's behaviour. If a person knows that it can be used against them, they will try to hide it. If one knows that the current employer will be allowed access to that information, they will think twice before asking a psychiatrist for help or joining a self-help alcohol support group. The commonly observed policies do take into account the secrecy of such information, however in many of the Western countries it is common to leave some vague space for exceptions which may undermine the patients' trust. For example, insurers in the EU, USA and UK require that applicants give consent for them to have access to their medical records. Similarly, employers are able to request such a consent from their employees or applicants. Both regulations GDPR (EU, UK) and HIPAA (USA) demand that the requesters treat that information with "stringent security controls" and "only for legitimate purposes", but as examples show, it is not enough to protect people from being fired because they were too honest with their psychiatrists. We can only wonder if they are going to be that honest again.

The extent to which the data is harvested was studied in [4], which shows among other things that all of the analysed smartphone dating applications were creating behavioural profiles of users and sending them to data brokers, whose business model consists in selling that type of data to any potential buyers. Aside from this, the medical data concerns are explored in [5].

Trust

We are sometimes entrusted with carrying our friends' secrets. We need to have some control of our privacy in order to deliver on our promise of confidentiality. A friend may not be impressed if we do not treat these secrets respectfully and leak them, even unintentionally, to big tech. Confidentiality is one of the most important ingredients of trust, so if we cannot deliver on it to the full extent, we might be isolated from some important information or from deepening the relationship.

Tinkering with Ideas

One more reason to look after privacy is creating space for unhampered personal exploration of ideas. Questioning any of the assumptions and recognised authorities is a good technique to bring us closer to truth. To always leave at least a bit of doubt is a core principle of the scientific method. This means we need space to diligently explore hypotheses, even if they may be totally wrong. To be able to move our understanding further we must be able to ask questions like "what if Hitler was right" or, more generally, "what if the other side is right and my echo chamber is wrong", or as the joke goes "folks, what if we are the bad guys". If we want to truly understand why certain assumptions are true, we must first understand them and that requires giving them the benefit of doubt. But for a side observer, such activity may look like a betrayal: "he must be a supporter of Nazi, because he's reading a Hitler's book", or "she's reading books about manipulations in religious cults, she must be thinking of betraying our group". It is easy to limit people's ability to grow their understanding of the world's mechanisms by carefully watching them and their mental explorations. When people know that they are watched, they change their behaviour, as they fear that they will be judged. That watchful attitude is sometimes explained by the worry that people would read inadequate books and fall into rhetoric traps inside them. This strategy is wrong though. Shielding people from other views leads to lack of understanding, polarisation of groups, and consequently pushes us into the very problems that this strategy meant to protect us from - repeating the mistakes of the past. This problem does not only apply to small cults watching closely their members. To some extent it also applies to internet users, as many organisations are following our browsing history, book/e-book purchase and reading history, social media interactions, who we are meeting with, our emails, and even spoken conversations, then aggregating them into our profiles and selling that information to their buyers. In many countries, thanks to the new regulations (GDPR mainly), the most personal data may not be used for profiling, however that is generally a very grey area with many workarounds. For example, while sensitive data cannot be used for solely automatic decision making, it can supplement a manual decision-making process and the boundary between them is quite blur. Being constantly followed in the internet is severely limiting our ability to think critically. Privacy gives back the option to think critically.

Discrimination

Privacy is also a good measure to shield us from discrimination. If the other party does not know our religion, they will simply not be able to be biased or act unfairly. Similarly, research [5] shows that the fear of discrimination is a major factor contributing to avoidance of mental health care when it would be needed. Another interesting case of discrimination is allowing companies to perform criminal checks on their employees and candidates. It is a form of additional punishment, which is not applied by a court, but unilaterally by an employer which want to avoid risk, or want to present themselves as a prestiguous workplace. Courts already have tools to ban someone from working in a certain field (e.g. in finance, or with children), so there is no justification for blanket criminal checks. Another similar example is credit reporting agency, which can collect data about people who e.g. did not pay their internet bill while they were in dispute with the provider, even when they were right, yet their creditworthiness is dimished forever. It is then a clear example of another off-court social punishment system.

I Have Nothing to Hide

As Shoshana Zuboff [6] once said: "If you have nothing to hide, you are nothing". The need to hide things stems from the need to protect what is dear to us. If we have nothing to hide, then nothing is important to us, and we make no difference. A similar, commonly used phrase is "if you've done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to hide", which is another version of this misconception. While it may seem that most people agree with the mainstream approach, making privacy appear unnecessary, there inevitably comes a time when those same people strongly disagree with some aspects taken for granted by the mainstream. We do not claim that people disagree with each other all the time, but they sometimes do, and it is crucial to allow them to do so, which requires privacy. Edward Snowden's [7] words could summarise it well: "Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say".

What We Are Dreaming of

We believe there are better ways and we are not doomed to live in a world lacking privacy. Let us then focus now on what it is that we would ideally like to see.

1. We want to maximise our personal freedom, so that we can be authentic, follow our true political and social views, without feeling pressure from our environment, as long as we stay within the law.

2. We want to be able to make mistakes and pay for them the adequate price. But we do not want to always be viewed at through the lens of those mistakes. Feeling that we will have another chance if we fail takes a lot of stress from us and allows us to be bold, while still it does not mean that we can get away with anything - we only want the price to be adequate as opposed to the eternal social exclusion and becoming an easy object of ridicule.

3. When we are applying for a new job, for a credit, or to a university, we want to be judged based on what we represent here and now, not on all of our marks starting from pre-school.

4. We want to have a personal secluded space, where we are free to explore different views, thoughts, be able to speak about them with friends, without the fear of being judged by someone else listening to our conversation or analysing our browsing history, especially if it is an automated machine learning algorithm that no one takes responsibility for (or often even understands).

5. We want our personal life not to leak into public space without our consent. We want to feel safe in our personal life, not needing to constantly act as if our words could be taken out of context and end up in a meme or a morning TV programme. We want to be able to feel relaxed at our homes, so that we can be spontaneous and experience joy.

6. We want the democratic mechanisms like opposition to have space to grow free from the pressure that the majority could apply to it if it wanted to - even when we agree with the current majority.

7. We want to be able to use the modern technology with similar expectations as if they were our employees - serving us and keeping our data confidential. We would not expect a secretary to trade our insider information with competitors. We want a similar degree of loyalty from the modern technology.

8. We want to be able to keep certain things secret from anyone, if we wish to. We want to be able to discuss intimate problems with our friends without seeing related ads the next day.

9. We want to be able to use medical service and have full trust in them when giving them all honest information about ourselves, without the fear that this information will be used against us. When employers want to test if we are fit for job, they should perform new tests rather than browsing our medical history.

10. We do not want manipulators to know our weaknesses.

What We Can Do to Get There

We can think about 3 main avenues:

1. Develop your own knowledge and position on this topic. Maybe the above article convinced you to the importance of privacy. Speak about these issues, raise awareness within your environment. Feel free to share this article. There are also plenty of other materials: we particularly like Electronic Frontier Foundation [8] for their attitude to privacy. Maybe you are not convinced to the idea of privacy - we would be very happy to hear why, and discuss.

2. Take care of your personal environment: choice of communicator, email provider, browser, etc. We are now writing a separate article about those concrete steps.

3. As a society, we should work on policies which would help build culture with privacy built-in. We believe that the current leading regulations are a step in a good direction, and that we need a few more radical steps yet. (This is another article that is being written now.) By its nature, privacy is a collective good. As stated by Priscilla Regan [9], privacy cannot be enjoyed by a person without "all persons having a similar minimum level of privacy".

Privacy is a necessary component of a society which supports citizen's happiness. Yet, privacy remains an obstacle to some commercial companies profits and also complicates governments control of public order. The "big players" like big ad-tech companies together with some governments are then not impartial, while they are the ones mostly involved in policy making and creating a narrative around these issues. One such narrative is that we must choose middle-ground between privacy and profitability, or between privacy and security. This is not true. We, as a society, should choose such regulations which serve best to the citizens, regardless if such regulations happen to be very different from the current status-quo. In particular, we have no obligation to barter our privacy regulations with big companies. And we certainly have the right to demand from governments to protect our privacy as well as security. Finally, we wanted to express our gratitude to the organisations which were created solely for the purpose of defending our civil rights, with some examples specifically from the privacy domain: Privacy International, Panoptykon Foundation, and the already mentioned Electronic Frontier Foundation [10].

Please help us improve this article by leaving a comment or by sharing it with your friends, though if you choose to keep your views secret, we will fully understand.

Side Notes

False Trade-off

It is a common misconception that there is a trade-off between security and privacy. We have not encountered yet a problem which could not be solved in a privacy-friendly manner. The real problem is that privacy does not come naturally, it requires intentional effort, which makes for a higher cost of a solution. Another big problem is that the current market of "free" services available publicly, like Gmail, created a big market based on surveillance, and changing this would mean an earthquake for the global market, because they happen to be the biggest players currently. That means that e.g. USA would probably loose a lot in tax, jobs, strategic and economic advantage as a state, so even as a country they may be in a trap, where doing the right thing would cause negative effect on their economy. Because those companies are so big and they also happen to control media flow, they have a huge leverage on presenting the privacy problem as something which we should not tinker with, as it is already done properly by the experts, saying for example that we must carefully choose the balance between security and privacy. And because security is very important, that means that the current situation is good.

Citizen Control

Many nations believe that citizens should have means to control their state. Particularly, it is promoted as one of the main reasons why Americans want to keep guns in personal possession - just in case that the state would go rough. They seem to have overslept the weapons revolution, though. Nowadays, controlling data is much better of a weapon than guns. If their state could bring any leader of a resistance to disrepute (even within their own group), then their guns might turn out to as useful as a lethal venom is for a snake kept in a terrarium.

Transparency

Scandinavian nations (Sweden, Norway and Denmark) highly value transparency, meaning that all citizens' income, taxes, addresses, phone numbers, and dates of birth are publicly available. While these types of data seem actually least important from the privacy standpoint, it is critical that this attitude does not spread further into the "we should have nothing to hide" territory.

Buying Data About Citizens

It is interesting how in many countries, the governments have very tight regulations about gathering information on citizens, e.g. tapping can only be done with the court consent, but yet the same government is able to buy similar data from private sector, which happens to have this information, as it is less regulated.

Objectively Optimal

As we mentioned before, privacy is a way to regain personal control. One small example from casual life is the case of cooperative board games. If you played one, there are high chances you might have observed that if all information is known to all players, then a common way the gameplay rolls out is that one player who is most extroverted takes over all actions and decisions on behalf of all other players, because he or she best understands the "objectively optimal" tactic in that game. Similar in nature to how some parents know better what is best to their children, better even than these children, even when they are adult. The game engine prohibiting showing each other cards is one of the core steps which may alleviate the power imbalance between the players and bring them back to the game.

Privacy Is Not New

Occasionally we can hear a narrative that privacy is a new concept, a temporary trend, or a reaction to rapid modern technology advancements. In fact, the concept of separation between public and private part of life was discussed already by ancient Greek philosophers. Fast forward to 1859, when John Stuart Mill published a classic book "On Liberty", which speaks a lot about the need for privacy. Many of the concepts relevant to modern mass-surveillance were discussed in another classic "Privacy as Personal Control" by Carl Johnson in 1974, which suggests that the privacy concerns are general, not just of our digital age. Finally, so far we avoided speaking about the definition of privacy, which was neatly described by Alan Westin in "Privacy and Freedom", in 1968, as "[a person's right] to decide what information about himself should be communicated to others and under what condition".

References

[1] Kai Strittmatter vividly describes these mechanisms in his book "We Have Been Harmonised: Life in China's Surveillance State" (2020)

[2] The below articles and studies explore how perceived surveillance negatively impacts our well-being in various situations:

Mark Warner, Victoria Wang, "Self-censorship in social networking sites (SNSs) - privacy concerns, privacy awareness, perceived vulnerability and information management" (2019)

Anja Stevic, Desirée Schmuck, Anna Koemets, Melanie Hirsch, Kathrin Karsay, Marina Thomas, Jörg Matthes, "Privacy concerns can stress you out: Investigating the reciprocal relationship between mobile social media privacy concerns and perceived stress" (2022)

John Wellman: Recreational Response to Privacy Stress, "A Validation Study fishermen escaping micro-neighbourhood lack of privacy" (1979)

Mihaela Vorvoreanu, Carl Botan, "Examining Electronic Surveillance In The Workplace: A Review Of Theoretical Perspectives And Research Findings" (2000)

Lisa Block, Garnett Stokes, "Performance and satisfaction in private versus nonprivate work settings in the office: Perceived enclosure is an important predictor of privacy, environmental satisfaction and stress." (1989)

... and a classic: Carl Johnson, "Privacy as Personal Control" (1974)

It is worth noting that the majority of studies take as a tenet that perceived lack of privacy causes stress and focus on developing the theory behind it, rather than conducting empirical studies. This may be because it is considered a naturally obvious phenomenon. However, some studies do provide empirical evidence.

[3]

[4] A detailed analysis of sensitive data harvesting by mobile applications. Performed by Norwegian Consumer Council:

[5] For example:

and also particularly in India, where the central system with patient data called Aadhaar sparks controversies:

[6] Shoshana Zuboff's book called "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" (2018) illustrates the far-reaching the consequences of a lack of privacy

[7] Edward Snowden is a highly controversial person: to some, he is a whistleblower who revealed the scale of secret mass surveillance programmes in the USA and its allies, while to others he is a spy who simply revealed classified information. At Complicated World, we are grateful to him for allowing us to learn the extent of the global system of surveillance, which was not something we were aware of before (contrary to what some suggest, downplaying the role of his disclosure). At the same time, we do not have a firm understanding of whether it could be done without revealing the information which led to quite far-reaching consequences, e.g. as US government says: state enemies learning classified military tactics and the need to evacuate spies from some territories.

[8] E.g. Cory Doctorow's:

[9] Priscilla Regan, "Legislating Privacy: Technology, Social Values and Public Policy." (1995)

[10]