Privacy
10 min read
The Case Against Privacy: Privacy Impedes Progress
Why Privacy Matters: Privacy Safeguards Human Autonomy
Data Collectors: Who They Are and Why It Matters
What To Do Next: Practical Steps for Digital Privacy
The Case Against Privacy
Privacy represents an outdated construct that actively impedes societal progress in our interconnected world. The costs of maintaining individual privacy clearly outweigh its increasingly irrelevant benefits. China's surveillance infrastructure demonstrates how transparency actively strengthens society. Their network deters criminal behavior and contributes to a significant sense of security among its population.
Similarly, India's Aadhaar system showcases how reduced privacy directly enables progress through biometric data sharing. The system reduces fraud and ensures equitable access to government programs and essential services. It has integrated hundreds of millions of previously unbanked citizens into the formal economy, unlocking access to credit, savings accounts, and digital payments for a population long excluded from financial opportunities. These successes expose how privacy protections primarily serve to shield illegal activities while hampering legitimate societal advancement.
Privacy actively enables harmful behavior while blocking innovations that could benefit society. Anonymous spaces online have become breeding grounds for harassment, fraud, and criminal enterprises through the lack of accountability that privacy provides. In contrast, verified digital spaces like LinkedIn, where real identities are used, show dramatically lower rates of abuse and higher levels of productive engagement.
The same pattern emerges across all sectors. Privacy requirements impede medical research, complicate criminal investigations, and create inefficiencies throughout the banking sector. The removal of privacy barriers consistently yields tangible benefits through faster services, better security, reduced fraud, and more effective governance.
The advantages of transparency have already led most people to voluntarily embrace data sharing across numerous aspects of daily life. From social media to smart devices, financial services to healthcare, individuals regularly choose convenience and functionality over privacy. This organic shift exposes how privacy increasingly becomes a negotiable value rather than an absolute right. Far from protecting legitimate interests, privacy primarily functions as a convenient cover for criminal behaviour.
As innovations in AI, biotechnology, and smart infrastructure accelerate, maintaining outdated privacy protections will only widen the gap between societies that embrace transparency and those that fall behind. The evidence is clear: privacy is not a right to be preserved but an obstacle to be dismantled for the greater good of society.
Why Privacy Matters
The right to privacy is essential to human dignity and individual freedom, extending far beyond personal preference. While critics frame privacy as outdated, evidence shows that surveillance fundamentally alters human behavior. People behave differently when watched; they become more conformist, less creative, and less likely to challenge societal norms. A surveillance society not only monitors behavior but fundamentally reshapes it, creating a pervasive dampening effect on personal and societal growth.
Moreover, history repeatedly shows that surveillance powers, once established, inevitably expand beyond their original scope and are weaponized against vulnerable populations. Even systems designed with benevolent intentions demonstrate this pattern.
India's Aadhaar system, initially praised for enabling financial inclusion among the poor, led to catastrophic privacy breaches that exposed over a billion people's biometric data, resulting in widespread welfare theft and identity fraud that undermined its promise of financial inclusion. Similarly, China's surveillance system, while ostensibly improving public safety, has evolved into a tool for the systematic persecution of minorities, religious groups, and political dissidents.
While traditional surveillance alters behavior through observation alone, artificial intelligence magnifies these effects by converting everyday digital traces into deep psychological insights.
Today's AI developments transform surveillance from simple observation into predictive control. While traditional surveillance tracks what we do, AI systems interpret seemingly innocuous data like our walking pace, typing patterns, and app usage to predict who we are and what we might do next. This leap from monitoring to prediction enables unprecedented forms of discrimination.
Insurance companies already use social media profiles to adjust insurance premiums, while lenders determine our creditworthiness by scrutinizing our digital activity, including the websites we visit and the friends we have on Instagram. These examples only hint at future risks; without robust privacy protections, every digital interaction becomes part of a permanent profile that can be used against us in ways we have yet to imagine.
The shift from human observation to AI analysis means even mundane activities can reveal our most intimate characteristics, turning daily life into a continuous, involuntary disclosure of personal vulnerabilities.
The looming threats of AI surveillance might suggest we must choose between technological progress and personal privacy. Yet this conflict is artificial. Privacy-preserving technologies already demonstrate how innovation and data protection can advance together. Zero knowledge proofs now enable secure identity verification without vulnerable centralized databases, while homomorphic encryption allows sophisticated data analysis without decrypting sensitive information.
The European Union's privacy-focused market has flourished since implementing strong data protection regulations, creating new industries and approaches to data-driven innovation. Rather than accepting a false trade-off between progress and privacy, we must demand systems that protect both our security and our fundamental right to control our personal information.
The impact of privacy-preserving innovation reaches far beyond defensive measures. When privacy becomes a core design requirement, it drives engineers to develop more sophisticated and resilient solutions. Consider how end-to-end encryption sparked a revolution in secure communication, or how differential privacy techniques emerged to enable data analysis while protecting individual privacy.
The challenge lies not in choosing between privacy and progress, but in using privacy requirements to fuel the next wave of technological breakthroughs. Privacy becomes not a constraint but a catalyst for innovation that enhances both security and human dignity. It becomes essential not just for protection but for responsible innovation and human development in our digital age.
Privacy empowers us to think freely, create boldly, and form genuine connections in a world increasingly mediated by technology. It serves as our fundamental safeguard against automated discrimination, behavioral manipulation, and the silent pressures of constant observation.
As artificial intelligence grows more sophisticated, privacy stands as the guardian between a future of human agency and one of algorithmic control. True progress requires us to embrace privacy as a core principle that ensures technology enhances rather than diminishes human dignity and autonomy.
Data Collectors: Who They Are and Why It Matters
Governments. What They Do: Mass surveillance, data collection, and laws that may infringe on individual privacy. Why It Matters: Governments can use surveillance to control populations, suppress dissent, or infringe on human rights under the guise of national security or public safety. Privacy breaches could have severe consequences including legal, social, or physical harm. I don’t think this is a major concern for most people reading this post, but there are 2.2 billion people (27% of the world’s population) who live in closed autocracies. In those societies, power is concentrated in the hands of a single leader or a small group. As Lord Acton famously said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Corporations.
What They Do: Harvest personal data for profit, transforming your digital footprint into trillions of dollars of market value through targeted advertisements and third-party data sales. Why It Matters: This unrestrained data collection exposes your financial status, health conditions, relationships, political views, and real-time location - creating a comprehensive profile for corporate exploitation. Your shopping habits and app usage alone can reveal mental health struggles, relationship problems, and life changes, making you a target at your most vulnerable moments. When Apple released its App Tracking Transparency in 2021, users overwhelmingly chose to limit tracking, reducing trackable traffic in the US by 75%. This proves a simple truth: given the choice, people want control over their personal information. If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Your ISP sees everything - every website, unencrypted email, and message passing through their networks. In the US, they can sell your browsing history to advertisers with no opt-out option, while Canadian ISPs must get your explicit consent. As information gatekeepers, ISPs also serve government interests - in countries with mass surveillance, they're legally required to monitor and control internet access, making them a critical tool for state control.
Social Media Platforms. While you scroll through photos and chat with friends, platforms track everything: your lingering on posts, deleted drafts, scrolling patterns, and emotional reactions. Instagram and Facebook make money by keeping you engaged without regard to your wellbeing. TikTok presents a unique geopolitical threat; under China's National Intelligence Law, it must share user data for "state intelligence work" without disclosure, turning the platform into a strategic asset for the Chinese government.
Third-Party App Developers. Most apps collect far more personal data than necessary, well beyond their core functions. That simple weather app might be accessing your contacts, photos, and location history - all under the guise of "improving user experience" while feeding the data broker industry.
Advertisers and Data Brokers. These middlemen aggregate data from all previous sources - social media, ISPs, apps - to build intimate profiles of your life, which they sell to the highest bidder. This massive surveillance network shapes not just what you see online, but potentially what you believe and how you behave.
Employers.
What They Do: Monitor workplace activity through email tracking, productivity software, and video surveillance. Remote work has intensified this through keyboard tracking, periodic screenshots, and application usage. Employers are now starting to deploy deeper-reaching AI systems to analyze communications and track biometric patterns. With corporate assets now residing on personal home networks, security risks for companies and privacy risks for employees have intensified.
Why It Matters: While necessary for protecting assets, excessive monitoring fundamentally shifts workplace dynamics from trust to surveillance. Employers often use these tools appropriately to protect intellectual property and ensure productivity, but monitoring practices inevitably collect more data than necessary. Remote work has turned personal spaces into extensions of the corporate environment, enabling systematic capture of private information. This expanded permanent record can subtly influence employee evaluations - from performance reviews to terminations.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Systems.
What They Do: AI systems collect and process vast amounts of personal data to model and predict human behavior. They analyze everything from your shopping habits and social media interactions to your beliefs and emotional states. Modern AI can identify patterns in behavior that even you might not be aware of, creating detailed psychological profiles that can be used to predict and influence your decisions. These systems continuously observe, learn, and adapt their understanding of your vulnerabilities, desires, and decision-making patterns.
Why It Matters: AI poses unique privacy challenges because these systems can infer sensitive information (like sexual orientation, political views, or medical conditions) from scattered pieces of data to form remarkably accurate pictures of our lives, personalities, and vulnerabilities. Operating as "black boxes," these systems make decisions that affect people’s lives without transparency, while potentially perpetuating systemic biases from training data collected without proper consent.
Each entity offers certain benefits in exchange for our personal information, but these trades are rarely transparent or fair. Understanding who collects our data, how they use it, and what they gain helps us evaluate whether the benefits justify our loss of privacy.
In an era where personal data has become currency, this knowledge helps us make deliberate choices about our digital autonomy.
What To Do Next
A thoughtful approach to digital privacy starts with breaking up your online identity into distinct pieces rather than keeping everything connected. This means using different email addresses, payment methods, and internet access points for different services and activities. When you spread out your digital footprint this way, companies have a harder time building a complete picture of who you are and what you do online.
Privacy today isn't about trying to become completely invisible, which isn't realistic or necessary. Instead, it's about making conscious choices about who gets access to your personal information and how they can use it. By taking control of how your information flows across the internet, you can participate fully in digital life while maintaining meaningful boundaries. This balanced strategy helps protect your privacy without cutting you off from the benefits of being online.
Request to Delete Your Data: Consumer Reports has a great article on the deletion services available (mostly for US residents), and also provides instructions on how to do it yourself.
Opt Out of Data Collection: Take advantage of mechanisms that allow you to limit tracking and data sharing.
Limit Data Sharing: Regularly review app permissions and disable access to unnecessary data, such as location or contacts.
Review Social Media Privacy Settings: Restrict who can view your posts, profile, and personal information.
Be Cautious with AI-Driven Services: Minimize sharing sensitive information with AI systems.
Educate Yourself: Learn about privacy laws, data rights, and how your data is used.
Use a VPN: Encrypt your connection, mask your location, and protect your data, especially on public Wi-Fi. This prevents your internet provider, network operators, and websites from seeing your true IP address or linking your various online activities.
Use Privacy-Focused Tools
Browsers: Brave or Firefox protect your privacy through built-in tracking prevention and anti-fingerprinting measures. See detailed comparison table.
Search Engine: DuckDuckGo delivers search results without tracking your queries, storing your search history, or building a profile of your interests. Unlike traditional search engines, it shows the same results to all users rather than personalizing them based on past behavior.
Encrypted Messaging: Signal or Threema provide end-to-end encrypted communication that only intended recipients can read. Both apps minimize data collection about your contacts, message timing, and location. WhatsApp offers encryption but shares user data with Meta for advertising, including your contacts, message patterns, IP addresses, and business interactions.
Email Services: ProtonMail for email privacy and SimpleLogin for email aliases. Prevents email tracking and scatters your digital footprint by using different email addresses for different services.
Sources and Inspiration
India’s Aadhaar system (Mar 27, 2020): https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/what-happens-when-billion-identities-are-digitized
Data is the world’s most valuable resource (May 6, 2017): https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/the-worlds-most-valuable-resource-is-no-longer-oil-but-data
China’s crime statistics (Nov 23, 2023): https://www.economist.com/china/2023/11/23/china-says-it-has-achieved-a-miraculously-low-crime-society
Insurance premiums adjusted by social media (Apr 7, 2022): https://www.insurancethoughtleadership.com/data-analytics/how-use-social-media-data-underwriting
Creditworthiness adjusted by social media (Jan 26, 2024): https://www.ey.com/en_be/insights/financial-services/how-embedded-finance-and-ai-impact-the-lending-sector
Why privacy matters (Oct 2014): https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters
The 2.2bn people living under autocracies (2024 report): https://v-dem.net/publications/democracy-reports/
Apple’s ATT reduced trackable traffic from 73% to 18%, a 75% decline: Lennart Kraft, “Economic Impact of Opt-in versus Opt-out Requirements for Personal Data Usage: The Case of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT)”, SSRN, Nov 20, 2023, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4598472