REPORTS of the death of privacy are nothing new. In 1890, prompted by the ādeep-seated abhorrence of the invasions of social privacyā made possible by Kodak cameras, US lawyers Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren wrote an influential tract called The Right to Privacy that attempted to delineate the boundary between personal and public spheres.
For most of us, a degree of privacy is important, even if we may struggle to say why. āPrivacy is far from being dead,ā says digital anthropologist at the University of Hamburg in Germany. āIt is an existential need, a condition in which we feel safe, comfortable and secure.ā
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In the internet era, invasions of privacy come from two main directions. First, large parts of the web have been engineered by commercial companies to monitor our every online move in the name of profit: Google, Facebook and the like make their billions by selling advertising targeted to desires we may not even be aware we have. Second, governments and other public bodies have begun to take advantage of the tools of mass surveillance the internet provides in the name of better public security.
In the first instance, we can arguably all choose whether to buy in to surveillance or not. If we do, our reward is better services, whether improved search results or more relevant recommendations. In practice, however, the near-monopoly positions of certain big tech firms make it very difficult for you to avoid giving them your personal data, and we have only very rudimentary control over how it is used.
Similar trade-offs exist in government monitoring of our online activities. The internet has become our main channel of communication. The end-to-end encryption of messaging services such as WhatsApp or Telegram, for example, is a boon also to the privacy of those who would do society harm ā and leads to the desire of security services to find āback doorsā into such services.
Finding the correct balance between personal privacy and public security isnāt a new challenge, but the existence of large amounts of data about all of us online has tipped that balance. In November, for example, a judge in Florida issued a warrant for police to search personal genetic profiles that more than a million people had uploaded to GEDmatch, a site used to trace ancestry, for matches to DNA from a crime scene. The law wouldnāt allow police to take a million DNA swabs of random people on the street without reasonable grounds to believe they were implicated in a crime.
Something to hide?
Such new invasions of privacy are often justified by the ānothing to hideā argument: if you are doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear from surveillance and everything to gain through increased protection against criminals, extremists and terrorists. But that argument is valid only as long as your definition of what constitutes a criminal, extremist or terrorist coincides with the stateās: just ask those involved in the recent street protests in Hong Kong.
Public disquiet about privacy seems to be growing. A recent conducted by the Pew Research Center, a think tank based in Washington DC, found that 81 per cent of people thought that the risks and downsides of companies collecting personal data outweighed the potential benefits; 66 per cent said the same about government data collection.
Some imbalance is perhaps to be expected as established norms and boundaries shift in the online world. Rules such as the European Unionās General Data Protection Regulation, implemented last year, represent an attempt to reset the dial, at least in the commercial sphere. āWeāre in the middle of renegotiating what privacy means,ā says Krueckeberg. She is confident that we can regain at least some control. āPeople are not helpless victims of the internet.ā
Cutting-edge science throws up all sorts of controversial, nebulous and mind-bending concepts. Hereās your guide to how to think about some of the fiddliest of them:
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