It has been said to let he who is without sin cast the first stone. If applied to privacy and snooping in the digital age, there would be very little stone chucking indeed.
I have long been of the opinion that the concept of “privacy” in the wireless age will be the topic of this century. Just as I have also long been an advocate of the individual’s responsibility to privacy.
What I mean by that is although it’s true that technology has made it far easier and cost-effective for states, corporations and individuals to snoop on private citizens, the individual users bear the lion’s share of the responsibility for making themselves snoopable. This is largely due to the prevalent and often unfiltered use of the Internet by people for a variety of issues ranging from commercial, social, or political interaction.
In many ways the Internet and the connectivity it creates brings back the concept of “community,” which was present in most human settlements for the vast majority of civilization. The concept of privacy that some are so keen to vehemently cling to is a relatively recent byproduct of the dual trends in urbanization and population growth.
The idea is simple when you live in a small community such as a town or village: You’re likely to know your neighbors and what they’re up to. Gossip, after all, has been around for a long, long time. The modern observer can easily conjure the image of two washer women “gossiping” over some scandalous news on a street corner in Ur circa 4,000 BC without too much difficulty.
For the majority of human history, local gossip or, put less politely, the systematic invasion and discussion of ones affairs by their peers, was a mainstay of human settlements. For the majority of history, settlements were small things: London circa 1600 had a population of about 200,000 compared to the 8 million people residing in metropolitan London today. If historical estimates are to be believed, circa 1600 the entire population of England was only roughly 3 million people, the majority of whom lived in small settlements.
Times have changed. We as a civilization no longer habituate small tight-knit communities but instead live in huge anonymous cities. As we have lost our sense of community through urbanization, our expectation of privacy has grown. The law has codified this and, with some bumps and slip-ups, has done a fairly good job of keeping up with the changing times. The special warrants required for wire taps on phone lines and the planting of eavesdropping equipment in a home are excellent examples. What is said online through a myriad of communication applications or over cellphones is another story.
The snooping by the U.S. Government and other global intelligence agencies has caused outrage among people on a global scale. These outraged individuals promptly took to the Internet to voice their anger. Ironic considering it was their free and willful use of the Internet that first made their private information available for collection. Yet it is impossible to live off-line because humans are social creatures who invented conversation and gossip before they created the wheel.
It would be my argument to not treat any digital domain as a room in your own home that’s protected by legal expectations of privacy and implied anonymity where you can say and do anything without fear of consequences. Rather, it might be wise to treat the digital realm as a village pub or other communal gathering spot, a semi-public place where you can gossip with friends and conduct business, but you still may be overheard or observed by those of malicious intent or a representative of the law.
Going about demanding that you’re accorded the same level of privacy on the Internet as you are in your domicile, as Max Schrems who is currently suing Facebook would like, seems to be laughable at best. Rather than adjusting the new technology to fit notions and expectations that came into vogue in the last century, society should adjust itself to accept the reality of the new technology, which allows an individual to be both anonymous and notorious simultaneously.
