I'm not impressed with the perception that normal people have about privacy. It's usually dismissed as something completely impossible to accomplish or not deserving of any effort. Some pretty common examples of this are the following arguments. “What’s the point? You can’t be 100% secure so why bother?”. “Why does it even matter if *company name* has my information? What are they going to do with it, anyway?” I hear this weird defeatism mentality even among people who aren’t defeatist on any other topic, and they always regurgitate the same arguments. This leads me to believe some source is putting this idea in people’s heads that privacy just isn’t worth the hassle. I’m not sure who it is, maybe it’s google, maybe it’s the mainstream media, I don’t know. I digress, let’s get back to the main point.
Before I address why privacy is important, I’d like to tackle those specific arguments since I've got such a bone to pick with them. I also hear them frequently enough that I'd prefer to just redirect anyone who asks me that again to this journal. 100% privacy is, of course, impossible. There will always be an opening for attack, some way to find out information about you. This could be an error on your behalf, an undiscovered exploit, a service you use being compromised, so on and so fourth. This is a commonly known fact in the world of Cybersecurity. I’m not trying to imply that security and privacy are the same thing, but let’s be honest, they share a lot of similarities.
If you’re given the task of making sure the datacenter you work at doesn’t get hacked, and your response is “well, there will always be an attack vector, so why even bother with all that setup anyway?” then guess what? You immediately become more vulnerable to attacks. The same thing applies with privacy. If you submit your information everywhere like it’s in fashion, you’re allowing more of that information to circulate. If you have any self respect, you should be working to make sure as little personally identifying details about yourself is circulating as conceivably possible. I’m not saying you should smash your hard drive, delete all your accounts, and go off the grid into the woods. I’m only encouraging you to do something, anything. Do you really, honestly need to be making that facebook post about your eating habits? Do any of your family members really care about that episode of star wars you watched today? Does that social media account you use really need your phone number and home address? Where you work? Because I can guarantee you they don’t, and the only people who do care about that stuff will be using it maliciously.
It might not feel like it matters, because you don’t see the effects of it first hand, but a company building a profile on you is absolutely not a good thing. Consider that if the data collection really "wasn't a big deal, what will they do with it anyway?", they wouldn't be so dead set on getting that information. Why even take the risk at all? On the end user side, all you’ll see is targeted ads and recommendations, which, while subjective, is usually a convenience. It’s not worth it for reasons I’ll get into later. This does manifest in destructive ways, too. A company’s only goal is to generate a profit, and personal data is an insanely profitable industry. If you are being profiled, that information is sold to other parties as well. Even if you’re enough of a fool to trust Instagram’s judgement of how your info Is maintained, can you really trust the thousands of third parties they are selling that stuff to? If you don’t see what’s wrong with that, you should really do some self reflection. Any of those companies can be compromised at any point, and then now all of that private stuff is now in public view for everyone to see.
That profile of you can also be used to predict future actions. This has been done several times in the past already. We live in the age of artificial intelligence, algorithms and predictive programming. Now is a better time than ever to make sure those algorithms have as little to work with as possible. A machine being able to determine what your next course of action is before the thought even occurs to you has other consequences. Thankfully, some of us have the luxury of living in a free country where such a thing doesn’t matter much, but not only is that temporary, it’s arguably already being threatened. That doesn’t even account for areas in the first world with serious human rights concerns, like Scottland, where, a few years ago, a man was fined several thousand dollars and threatened with incarceration for making a joke about Nazis. Or in China, where all the citizens constantly walk on eggshells because their digital life is directly affected by their real lives, and vice versa. These same phenomenon could occur in the west, too.
So, how does privacy protect against legal threats, businesses profiting off of you without your knowledge, and predictive programming? It should be obvious by this point but I’ll spell it out. It’s in the word “privacy”. If you maintain privacy on some level, you can always fall back on that in the event that your rights or reputation are tarnished. Don’t even pretend there is no possibility of an unjust law being passed that punishes victimless crimes, they already exist. If you have no alternative identity to switch to, no anonymity, you’ll always be subject to that stuff everywhere you go. Pretending it’s not an issue is not only being dishonest, but it’s also dangerous.