Instead of considering privacy to be a right that you deserve, think of it as a condition that you can create for yourself. Comprehensive privacy is difficult to achieve — aim to hide the pieces of information that matter to you the most. Even in countries that say their citizens are entitled to privacy, abstract guarantees are meaningless if you don’t take action to protect the information that you want to conceal. (Remember, you’re only one “national security emergency” away from losing all the rights you were promised.)
Photo by Cory Doctorow.
For the most part, protecting information with your actions means restricting access to it. As I wrote before, “when you trust third parties to protect your privacy (including medical data and financial access), you should resign yourself to being pwned eventually.”
The key to perfect privacy is to avoid recording or sharing any information in the first place. If you never write down your secret, then no one can copy-paste it elsewhere, nor bruteforce any cipher that you may have used to obscure it. Thank goodness we haven’t figured out how to hack brains in detail! But unfortunately, some pieces of information — like passwords with plenty of entropy — aren’t useful unless you’re able to copy-paste them. Who can memorize fifty different diceware phrases? The key to imperfect-but-acceptable privacy is figuring out your limits and acting accordingly. How much risk are you willing to live with?
The main argument against my position is that responsibilities that could be assigned to communities are instead pushed onto individuals, who are demonstrably ill-equipped to cope with the requirements of infosec.
“Neoliberalism insists that we are all responsible for ourselves, and its prime characteristic is the privatisation of resources — like education, healthcare, and water — once considered essential rights for everyone (for at least a relatively brief period in human history so far). Within this severely privatised realm, choice emerges as a mantra for all individuals: we can all now have infinite choices, whether between brands of orange juice or schools or banks. This reverence for choice extends to how we are continually pushed to think of ourselves as not just rewarded with choices in material goods and services but with choices in how we constitute our individual selves in order to survive.” — Yasmin Nair
Reddit user m_bishop weighed in:
“I’ve been saying this for years. Treat anything you say online like you’re shouting it in a crowded subway station. It’s not everyone else’s job to ignore you, though it is generally considered rude to listen in.
Bottom line, if you don’t want people to see you naked, don’t walk down the street without your clothes on. All the written agreements and promises to simply ‘not look’ aren’t going to work.”
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