Governments at the local, state, and federal level
increasingly collect troves of sensitive information about where we go, what we
read, who we know, what we buy, and more. Some people say they don’t care about
this silent and ever present surveillance. They have nothing to hide, they say.
But acquiescing to losing control over information
about you is effectively rolling over and accepting the fact that untold
numbers of people and institutions, not you, control your life. Information is
power. When people behind closed doors possess information about your private
life, usually unbeknownst to you, they have the ability to wield substantial
power to control and manipulate you, often without your knowledge.
“I am not so interesting,” you protest. Maybe you’re
right. The fact that unknown numbers of unknowns have the knowledge and
therefore the power to hurt you doesn’t mean they’ll always use it (or that
they’ll use it against you). But do you want to run that risk? Is that a risk
you are willing to concede about your children’s privacy, or your parents’? Is
that a risk you are willing to accept for the climate activists fighting dirty
energy subsidies, or the young kids in your neighborhood getting shaken down by
the police?
Even if you lead a quiet life, and don’t meddle in
politics or challenge powerful people (or are lucky enough to never have to
deal with fracking on your neighbor’s land, for
example), are you willing to run the risk that someday you might end up in
a power struggle--however big or small--with someone who controls or can access
sensitive information about your private life? (If you have ever dated or would
ever consider dating anyone who works in IT at a major tech company, or for law
enforcement or in intelligence, you should be particularly wary.)
If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have
to hide? Here is a very, very incomplete list:
1.
Sexual text
messages (aka sexts) you send to lovers, partners, and spouses;
2.
Emails to lawyers containing information about
ongoing litigation against any part of the government, or emails describing any
impropriety like an affair or something as simple as playing hooky from work
and calling in sick;
3.
Phone calls and visits to abortion clinics,
sexual health centers, gun stores, LGBT community centers, union shops,
domestic violence organizations, suicide hotlines, and journalists;
4.
Banking or credit card records showing that you
purchased sex toys, gonorrhea medication, and four hundred dollars worth of
stuff from a Furry website, or donated to non-profit organizations like the ACLU
or Planned Parenthood;
5.
Internet metadata revealing your porn viewing
habits and search terms, for example “herpes symptoms”, “what to do if you
think your boyfriend is cheating on you”, “how to cheat on your boyfriend and
get away with it”, or “I wish I had never had kids.”
As you can see, there’s plenty of information
floating around in the ether, held by private corporations and collected by
government agencies (often without
warrants!), that you want to remain private. You aren’t breaking the law
and you don’t deserve to be violated, but this information is not under your
control.
All it takes for your privacy to be violated in a way
that could get you fired from your job, exiled from your community, in trouble
with your friends or family, or kicked out of your house is for one of the
potentially millions of people who
have access to this kind of information to reveal it to someone you’d rather
not see it. You might never even know what happened, but suddenly you are out
of a job, or find yourself shunned by coworkers or friends.
If you think this is an impossible set of scenarios,
read up on the history of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, a man infamous for his
tyrannical obsession with embarrassing and slandering his personal and
political enemies. The information he provided, in secret, to Joseph McCarthy’s
House Un-American Activities Committee got many law-abiding people fired from
their jobs, and in far too many cases ruined their lives.
Some people say that privacy is obsolete because many
of us blab on and on about our every waking thought on Twitter, Facebook, and
other social media sites. But that assessment belies a fundamental
misunderstanding about what privacy means.
Privacy isn’t the same as secrecy. Privacy is about
controlling information about you, including who knows what, under what
circumstances, and when. Privacy is about being in control and in charge of
your own life, and having the power to shape other people’s perceptions of you.
Today, we are effectively at the mercy of millions of unknown people who lord
over us the power to destroy our reputations, relationships, and professional
lives with the click of a button.
Do you still feel like you have nothing to hide?
This is an edited version of a post first
published on the ACLU of Massachusetts’ Privacy SOS blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment