Privacy — what is it good for?

Published in

nymtech

4 min readJun 7, 2023

The concept of privacy in and of itself hardly means much. In fact, in some languages, the word doesn’t even exist! Instead, people use terms like dignity, security or integrity to describe what it means for people to be free from continuous observation. Let’s explore this a bit…

Ensuring dignity

Dignity implies having the peace and quiet to go about doing the things you need to do as a human without being observed, judged and attacked by others. For example, being able to work or study without your boss or teacher observing you and controlling your behaviour at all times. This implies that there is trust in you, respect for your abilities to explore, learn, create and develop and you are treated as a dignified person.

In a healthy workplace or school, the pressure of scrutiny, judgement and intervention is only applied during a review, project delivery or at an exam, not continuously. Online privacy protections enable you to maintain your dignity by ensuring you can work, create and explore online without being continuously monitored and monitized.

Ensuring security

Security is probably one of the most common associations with privacy. Privacy protections enable security by protecting the aspects of your person that might otherwise come under attack. Especially in the online world, in repressive regimes and high risk contexts. Ideas, values, backgrounds and perceptions of the world diverge to such a degree that people can quickly become threatened.

The security offered by strong privacy of communications is often undermined because it is thought that this is better for combating crime. But actually, criminals operate best when there is slack security. Opening back doors on everyone by compromising end-to-end encryption or turning a blind eye to mass-surveillance opens everyone up to targeting and manipulation by criminals and corporations. When mass surveillance is the norm, privacy protections become a luxury only the few (and often criminals) can afford. And this leaves the rest of society at their mercy without the same levels of protection.

Ensuring integrity

Integrity is a more abstract concept, but extremely important. It is best explained in reference to our physical body: our physical body is a single entity. The integrity of our body is generally protected by law, common practice and hippocratic oaths — a doctor needs your clear consent before intervening, organ trafficking is heavily penalised, and so on. We generally do not allow people to penetrate the integrity of our bodies without clear understanding and agreement on why and for what purpose (surgery for example).

Our mental and emotional processes are deserving of an equal level of integrity. They are part of who we are as individuals. But the profiling and targeting enabled through mass surveillance has turned our mental and emotional processes into data points bought and sold on digital marketplaces, free to trade and exploited by the highest bidder.

Protecting the undefined parts of ourselves and society

Finally, every one of us have parts of our identities that are unformed and still figuring things out. In order for people and societies to develop and grow, there needs to be space for the undefined — the parts we are not sure about yet, that are still experimental, tentative where we can try new ways of being and doing. This is a sensitive condition. We are likely to make mistakes or do things we later regret. The freedom to make mistakes and try out risky things is essential for discovery, creativity and wonder. Privacy enables this by protecting against premature observation, calculation and judgement.

If privacy enables dignity, security and integrity, it is worth considering: what does surveillance enable? The primary aims of surveillance are control, targeting and intervention. Whether criminals or consumers, the technology is the same: mass surveillance to calculate who to target, how to control and intervene in their behaviour. Understanding this difference between the two gives an understanding of the type of society that emerges if privacy or in contrast, surveillance is the default of society: dignity, security and integrity versus control, targeting and intervention.

Lately, privacy tools have been increasingly met with fear and concerns. This has resulted in regulations hostile to financial privacy and the undermining of protections, with the argument being that privacy provides a cover for criminals. But the truth is that the inverse is the case: the lack of privacy and the dominance of mass surveillance makes us all vulnerable to targeting by criminals and corporations.

The cypherpunks have a saying: transparency for the powerful, privacy for the rest of us. A society that ensures privacy as a default and embeds this as a principle in our shared infrastructures is a society that ensures dignity, security and integrity.