Privacy Defeatism FAQ
This article has been simultaneously published on the Many Worlds website.
With all the recent happenings regarding face scanning, Flock cameras, and creepy Ring Super Bowl ads, a lot of people are recoiling into the comforting embrace of surveillance fatalism. To help address this issue, we have come up with a brief response to the most common talking points that people have when they are tempted to take the black pill on digital self-defense. Please note that this is not a security primer. We do link to a resource at the bottom toward that purpose, but we do not give any security advice in this article because we are attempting to address a privacy-averse attitude that would not respond well to a barrage of unsolicited advice.
Q: "Isn't privacy dead?"
A: Privacy can only be dead when it stops protecting people. Just this week, a journalist was protected by their iPhone's lockdown mode feature, an instance that only stands out due to being a high-profile case wherein a mainstream reporter's device had been confiscated by the FBI. Every single day, countless people just like this journalist are alive and free because they took their privacy into their own hands. Every day, privacy keeps journalists, abortion-seekers, immigrants, LGBTQIA+ people, political dissidents, and many others safe from authoritarian governments, hate groups, and personal adversaries. In a time where more data is being collected than ever, privacy is more important, not less.
Q: "What's the point if they already have my data?"
A: "Your data" is not some fixed set of facts like your Social Security number and your mother's maiden name. It is every single behavior that you engage in. It is the trip you make to your dealer's house that passes by five Flock cameras each way. It is the Google search for "period five days late," followed by the search for flights to a blue state. It is the Facebook post that says, "Fuck ICE," (yes, even the one you "deleted") on the same day as the trip to the pawn shop where you looked at self-defense tools. It is you coming to this page to read this article, and the link you clicked, and your IP address, and the timestamp, and the specific device, and its geolocation data, and countless more data points.
There is a silver lining here, in that there is more room for you to exercise agency than ever. States and countries have fought long battles for privacy protections, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Applications like Signal make end-to-end encrypted communication easier than ever. Consumer devices come with privacy features built in, like iPhone's lockdown feature mentioned above. But these things alone aren't enough. If you want to stop the fire hose of personal data being collected to guess and manipulate your every move, then you have to be proactive.
Q: "Isn't that all just for criminals? What if I have nothing to hide?"
A: If you honestly believe this, then do me a favor and go hand your worst enemy your unlocked phone. Don't clear your browser history. Don't delete any DMs or notes. I'll wait.
"Obviously everyone believes in hiding some things from some people," you might say. "I mean that I don't have anything to hide from them." To that I ask, who do you think they are? Between companies, government agencies, data brokers, and hackers, do you actually know what information is in whose hands? Are you confident that you know what they are doing with it?
We don't have to speculate. We can see the consequences of all of this surveillance data. It assists stalkers. It provides support for false crime accusations. And don't forget that in the background, all day and every day, all this data is allowing organizations who do not share your interests to subtly manipulate your behaviors. Knowing this, why would you want to give them more data to work with? The thing they're spending billions upon billions of dollars to get more of? You want to give it for FREE?
Do yourself a favor next time you're thinking about Googling your symptoms or seeing if Amazon has some product you remembered hearing about. Download the Tor Browser and use it instead of your usual browser. Then, go back to your normal browser and pretend like you never used Tor. The difference is not in what you will see, but what you won't. You won't see relevant ads in your feed. You won't see influencer posts that just happen to be about the thing you looked up. Congratulations, you've just microdosed privacy! Take a moment and breathe it in. You have more agency than you realize!
Another point to be made here is this: you do not know the future. You do not know what the country you live in will be like next year. You do not know how you will respond to it. And even though they're doing their best to model for it, those companies and three-letter agencies don't know what you'll be either. It is simply too much data and too much inference at this point in time. Please, understand the implications of this. The fact is that we are not "cooked," but the oven is most certainly on and we are most certainly in it. If we were cooked, they would not be spending billions of dollars to provide additional power to the oven.
Finally, even if none of that has convinced you that you need to adopt better privacy practices, consider that your data is not just yours. Every data point on you is also context for other people's data. Each time you and your friends message each other on an insecure app like Instagram, you give that company and a network of third parties a new cluster of data points on the both of you at the very least. When you install a Ring camera, you expand the data pool that Amazon and many other organizations have access to regarding every single person who ever passes your house. You might not think you have anything to hide from the hundreds of Flock cameras in your city, but every immigrant and every abortion seeker does. By ignoring how your privacy practices and local privacy laws affect your community, you are actively making others more vulnerable.
Q: "This all seems overwhelming. Is there an easy way to protect myself? Like a product that I can buy that just takes care of all of this?"
A; Unfortunately, that's just not how it works. Security is a process, not a product, and that means that you do actually have to know some things in order to stay safe. On the bright side, a lot of work has been done to make privacy tech more convenient than it has ever been. Some great examples of this are Tor, Signal, and CryptPad. But more important than any product or project is something called Threat Modeling. It means taking a calculated assessment of your own situation and needs, then proceeding from there to determine what to do. Without a threat model for yourself and your loved ones, you are left to oscillating between the extremes of surveillance fatalism and paranoia as one news cycle follows the next.
Give your poor nervous system a break! Put on some tea, pull up the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Surveillance Self Defense guide, and make a Security Plan.
