Online Privacy and Why it Matters in Today's Hyper-Connected World

Online Privacy is a hot topic currently. If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear, but what does online privacy mean to you?

Does online privacy matter? What is online privacy?

To many, online privacy means doing something without judgement, shame or humiliation from others. It could be wild singing, dancing in underwear or something else. The thought of someone else watching or finding out mortifies them. It's a case: "This is something I'm willing to do only if no one else is watching."

Amid all the revelations from Edward Snowden that the United States and its partners, unknown to the entire world, have converted the Internet, once heralded as a place where freedom of speech has free reign, into an unprecedented zone of mass indiscriminate surveillance.

Most people believe that there is no real harm from this large-scale mass invasion of privacy because only people engaged in bad acts have a reason to want to hide and care about their privacy.

This view is grounded in the proposition that there are two kinds of people in the world: good and bad. Bad people are those who plot terrorist attacks or who engage in violent criminality and, therefore, have reasons to want to hide what they're doing; they have reasons to care about their privacy.

On the other hand, good people go to work, get married, have some kids, pay taxes and bills, watch TV, and follow fashion. They use the Internet not to plot bombing attacks but to read the news, exchange recipes, do grocery shopping, act normal, and obey the law. Those people are doing nothing wrong and, therefore, have nothing to hide and no reason to fear the government monitoring them.

These people are engaged in a very extreme act of self-deprecation. They have agreed that they will make themselves as harmless, unthreatening and uninteresting as possible so that they don't have to fear the government knowing what they are doing.

The mentality is highlighted in this clear quote from Eric Schmidt from Google.

If you're doing something you don't want other people to know, you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.Eric Schmidt - CEO of Google

There are several things wrong with this mentality. The first is that the people who think privacy isn't important don't believe it. They take all kinds of actions to protect their privacy. They put passwords on their email and social media accounts. They close the curtains to stop people from looking in. They may even close the bathroom door or lock it as well. These are all steps designed to prevent other people from entering what they consider to be their private place.

As human beings, we are social creatures. That means we need others to know what we're doing, saying and thinking. This is why we voluntarily publish information about ourselves online. Equally essential to what it means to be a free and fulfilled human being, we need to have a place that we can go to and be free of the judgemental eyes of other people.

We think and do all sorts of things that we're willing to tell our doctor, lawyer, psychologist, spouse or best friend that we would be horrified for the rest of the world to learn.

There is a reason why we need privacy, which is that when we're in a state where we can be monitored and watched, our behaviour changes dramatically. The range of behavioural options we consider when we think we're being watched is severely reduced. This is just a fact of human nature recognised in social science, literature, religion and virtually every field of discipline.

Shame is a powerful motivator, as is the desire to avoid it. It is why people in a state of being watched make decisions that are not the by-product of their behaviour but are about the expectations that others have of them or the mandates of societal orthodoxy.

The Panopticon and Crowd Behaviour

In the late 18th century, the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham conceived the concept of The Panopticon. The concept of the design is to allow all (pan-) inmates of an institution to be observed (-opticon) by a single watchman without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. The theory was that if the inmates didn't know if they were being watched, then at any given time, they would have to assume that they were being watched. Studies have proven that when somebody knows that they might be watched, their behaviour is vastly more conformist and compliant.

In the 20th century, French philosopher Michel Foucault realised that that model could be used not just for prisons but for every institution that seeks to control human behaviour - schools, hospitals, factories, and workplaces. He found that the theory behind the Panopticon was the key means of societal control for modern Western societies, which no longer need the overt weapons of tyranny - punishing or imprisoning or killing dissidents or legally compelling loyalty to a particular party. This is because mass surveillance creates a prison in the mind that is much more subtle and a much more effective means of fostering compliance, more effective than brute force could ever be.

Mass surveillance doesn't have to be contained within a Panopticon. It takes the form of every town and city. Instead of a single watchman, dozens of agencies exist in every country worldwide. If the leaks from Edward Snowdon have shown anything, it's that governments have the capability and desire to conduct mass surveillance on the population. They do this through the network of CCTV cameras, face recognition, number plate recognition on all the major roads, internet history storage, email monitoring, phone tapping, and mobile phone eavesdropping.

Online Privacy Isn't Just About Government Surveillance

It's not just the government spying on you. Have you bought anything from Amazon recently? Have you noticed that a seemingly unrelated website shows adverts for the product you bought or similar products? How did they know that?

What is even more worrying is that you have ever talked to someone about a particular topic, be it a sport or travel, and wouldn't it be nice to have something, only for those exact things, to start appearing in online adverts for you? Yes, smartphones, smart speakers, and smart assistance devices all record audio and send it to the servers to provide you with a convenient way of playing your musical playlist. Your online privacy is the price for that convenience.

So, to everyone reading this who still believes they don't worry about invasion of privacy because they have nothing to hide, I ask you to do this. In the comments section below, send me all your email addresses, full server names, login IDs, and password details. I am going to go through all your emails. I will publish and share something on social media when I find something interesting.

After all, if you're not a bad person or doing nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide.