For 99.99% of human history, one’s personal life was private by default. Only in the past 20 or 30 years has basic privacy come under serious threat.
The first systematic invasions of privacy started with the mail system. Once society at large found ways to deliver messages and items using a relatively fixed address system for every individual (easier in new territories, perhaps, than old), mail as we know it became feasible, but with it came the possibility for certain addresses to be monitored, and any mail sent to them could be intercepted and read. Moreover, the monitoring of whole groups of people also became a possibility, and Solzhenitsyn (a Russian soldier) was famously arrested by Russian intelligence during WW2 and sent to the gulags for writing a letter that very briefly complained about Stalin. The US regularly intercepted and read mail during the same time frame.
Once telephony became ubiquitous, wire-tapping of phone lines became a way to intercept communications in real-time, which was a huge leap forward in surveillance technology. The creation of the internet would put this surveillance into overdrive, and has led us to where we are today, with conversations used in real-time to build and modify advertising profiles for every single person, geolocation linking people to religious and civic organizations and protests, and companies and governments have come to know more about people than they even know about themselves.
I find it particularly vexing that so few of my own friends think about how insanely pervasive the threat to basic privacy has become. It’s still popular to say, “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”, but in my opinion, that completely misses the point. The point is, humans have no idea just how deep this rabbit hole goes, but we do know that such a thing has never existed before in history. We have no idea how many ways this data can be used against us, and the few examples we can pick out from history and science fiction may only scratch the surface. One day it might actually help stop terrorists, but the next day, it could just as easily be used to arrest you for tweeting against the current regime. In fact, that’s already happening, but you have to be paying attention to see it. “Nothing to hide” my ass. None of this data was anybody’s business in the first place.
Shoshana Zuboff does a fantastic job explaining how we got here in her book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”. I highly recommend it. It largely started with Google during the dotcom bubble, when they were under tremendous pressure from their shareholders to actually generate a profit. A few smart people came together and realized they could monetize searches with ads, and things only got worse and more invasive from there. Other companies like Facebook and Microsoft innovated even beyond this, and the unregulated market for “behavioral surplus” was born, a race-to-the-bottom that has been consuming our economy and destroying personal privacy for several decades now.
What’s crazy, too, is that we are so deep into this now that you are almost considered suspicious if you care about your privacy at all. The attitude is, “There’s nothing we can do, so why bother?” even though there are absolutely things you can and probably should do. It matters because this information is being weaponized against you, not just to part you from your hard-earned money, but also to monitor you for simply disagreeing with the powers that be. These companies, these governments, are turning themselves into clear and present dangers, literal adversaries, and as I type, some people at these companies and in these governments are finding new and creative ways to control you, either through fear (“Think before you post”) or through various arguments of “pre-crime”. Not all too far from here, a historical moment in AI development happened in which a power-tripping police officer approached a woman at her home and accused her of committing a crime that she didn’t commit, all because the AI surveillance cameras told him so. “You can’t get a breath of fresh air in this town without us knowing” is my paraphrase of a quote that will go down in history. Fortunately, she had proof of her non-involvement, and the police department got really quiet really fast. That is adversarial behavior! Individuals are supposed to be considered innocent until proven guilty, but there is a huge push to invert this, and that is a threat to absolutely everyone.
Slowly, we have all become habituated to the invasion of our privacy, and when not habituated, we are strategically dispossessed of it and pushed into exhaustion. The inventiveness is so extreme, so ubiquitous, that nobody can really tackle it from every angle and not go insane. The r/Privacy forum is full of doom from people who fear they just can’t handle every new assault on their basic privacy. Is it asking so much that our conversations and movements in our own homes not be monitored 24/7? Apparently, it is. Surveillance capitalism means that almost every company is incentivized to invade your privacy as much as it can for a slice of those sweet profits that hold our economy ransom. The only “innovation” that truly happens today is new and more clever ways to screw people out of their money and their privacy. Contrary to Conservative dogma, profits are not necessarily good for society, only those who own most of the corporate shares. It’s an entirely new type of economy the world has never seen before, so much so that refrigerators are being built to connect to the internet by default and televisions are using ACR software to snapshot the screen contents and phone it home for analysis and advertising. Even your Windows computer is trying to do this, too, and I thought Windows was shit beforehand.
The violation of our privacy is fuel for the violation of our rights. It can and is happening, and will only get worse if we do not push back. My ideas on how we do that I hope to share in another post.