Why Privacy Matters
Why Privacy Matters Even When You Have Nothing to Hide
I am often saddened when I hear people dismiss concerns about privacy by saying, “I have nothing to hide, so why should I care?”
I understand why people say it. On the surface, it sounds pretty reasonable. If you're not committing crimes, cheating anyone, or doing something you're ashamed of, why should it matter who knows what you're doing?
But I think that's one of the most dangerously misguided ways of looking at privacy.
Privacy isn't primarily about hiding wrongdoing. Privacy is about having enough unobserved space to live a genuinely free life.
We now live in a world where almost everything we do can create a data point. Where we go. What we buy. What we read. What we search for. Who we communicate with. Who our friends are. What organizations we associate with. What photographs we're in. What websites we visit. What we once said. What we once believed.
And increasingly, those individual data points can be collected, connected, analyzed, and used to make judgments about us. If I had to explain why privacy matters in just one sentence, I would say:
Privacy creates the space in which people can live experimentally.
It gives us room to:
- associate without endorsing.
- investigate without believing.
- make mistakes without making them permanent.
- change our minds.
- know unconventional people.
- become someone different.
- experiment with who we are and who we might become.
Those freedoms are enormously important because that is how human beings grow.
We meet people who are different from us. We encounter ideas that make us uncomfortable. We investigate things we don't understand. We try things. We make mistakes. We believe stupid things and eventually discover that they're stupid.
Occasionally we'll meet someone who is wrong about nine things but has something extraordinarily valuable to teach us about the tenth. Then we take what we've learned and move on. Or, at least we used to.
You Are Not Your Data Points, but...
Today, association can be interpreted as endorsement. Suppose we spend time with someone whose political opinions, religious beliefs, lifestyle, criminal history, or reputation are objectionable to other people. There are an abundance of reasons why you might be with that person?
Maybe they're a friend or a relative. Perhaps you're just trying to understand them. You might disagree with almost everything they believe but see them as a fascinating eccentric who's lived an extraordinary life. Maybe you simply enjoy talking to others with opposing views.
A database doesn't necessarily know any of that. It only knows A is associated with B. And an algorithm can make an inference from that association.
The same problem applies to information. Suppose I spend three evenings researching an extremist political movement. What does that tell you about me?
- Perhaps I'm considering joining it.
- Maybe I'm writing an article condemning it.
- Possibly someone I know has become involved with it, and I'm trying to understand what happened.
- I might have just stumbled across it, became curious, spent three evenings going down the rabbit hole, concluded that they're lunatics, and never thought about them again.
The data can tell you what I searched for. It cannot necessarily tell you why. Yet increasingly we confuse the existence of data with understanding the person who generated it.
Human Beings Need the Freedom to Be Wrong
There's another problem with permanent records that bothers me even more. Human beings learn by making mistakes. We try things that don't work. We form opinions that turn out to be wrong. We associate with people we later regret knowing. We say things at 20 that embarrass us at 40. We adopt identities and beliefs and eventually outgrow them.
That's not a defect in human development. That is human development.
But permanent digital memory changes the bargain. When mistakes become permanent records, experimentation becomes dangerous. When old opinions remain searchable forever, changing your mind doesn't necessarily erase the identity that other people—or machines—have constructed for you.
The person you were can begin competing with the person you are. And eventually people adapt to that environment.
- They become cautious.
- They don't investigate the controversial subject.
- They don't meet the questionable person.
- They don't express the half-formed thought.
- They don't experiment publicly.
- They don't risk being misunderstood.
Nobody has to explicitly prohibit any of these things because we prohibit ourselves. That is one of the most profound effects of losing privacy, and one of the least discussed.
The Chilling Effect
When people know—or merely believe—that they're being observed, they behave differently. That's the real answer to “I have nothing to hide.” You don't need to have anything to hide. You simply need something that could be misunderstood.
And every human being does. Perhaps an employer sees something differently than you intended. Maybe a landlord doesn't like an association. Or an insurance company interprets a data point differently than you would. A government agency could assign significance to something that is utterly innocent. And there's always the danger an unseen algorithm notices a pattern that correlates with something undesirable, even though that conclusion is completely wrong about you.
But you'll never even know that the judgment occurred. And once that possibility becomes understood, rational people begin adjusting their behavior. That's the chilling effect.
The important question is no longer: “Am I doing something wrong?”
It becomes: “Could somebody watching me think I'm doing something wrong?”
Those are radically different standards for living a life. The first allows you to exercise your own judgment. The second requires you to anticipate the judgment of an invisible observer.
We Once Had Room to Disappear
There was a time when much of ordinary life simply evaporated. You could spend an evening talking with a strange person and there was no record of it. You could read an unusual book and nobody knew. You could investigate an unpopular idea without creating a searchable history. You could make a foolish comment and, unless somebody happened to remember it, eventually it disappeared.
You could even spend a few years becoming one kind of person and then decide to become another. Your past existed, but it did not necessarily follow you everywhere. That impermanence wasn't a flaw in society. It was a form of freedom.
It gave us room to experiment, fail, reconsider, learn, and evolve. And when we did those things, we evolved as people. And when people evolve, society follows. That's what the “nothing to hide” argument misses.
The question isn't whether you have something shameful to conceal. The question is whether you want to live in a society in which every innocent curiosity, association, mistake, experiment, movement, and abandoned belief can potentially become part of a permanent record from which strangers and machines make judgments about who you are.
Because privacy isn't simply the ability to hide something. Privacy is the freedom to grow into someone you haven't yet become.
Privacy Protects Us From the Future
There's another reason the “I have nothing to hide” argument fails. It assumes that the standards by which we are judged today will be the standards by which we are judged tomorrow. History tells us that's a terrible assumption.
Something that's perfectly legal, socially acceptable, or simply unremarkable today may be regarded very differently 20 or 30 years from now. Laws change. Governments change. Employers change. Social values change. What society rewards today can change. What society condemns can also change.
Think about ordinary conversation just a few decades ago. Language and humor involving race, women, homosexuality, disabilities, and countless other subjects routinely appeared in workplaces, television programs, movies, comedy clubs, schools, and private conversations in ways that would be completely unacceptable today.
Mind you, I'm not suggesting that those attitudes were right. In many cases, society changed for very good reasons. That's precisely the point.
Imagine if everyone living in 1975 had carried a smartphone that photographed them, recorded their conversations, documented their friendships, preserved their jokes, tracked where they went, and published much of it into databases that would still be searchable 50 years later. How many perfectly ordinary people from that era could survive being judged today by an exhaustive digital record of themselves at 20? And what makes us think we're different?
Some things we consider perfectly acceptable today will almost certainly horrify people in 2050. We just don't know which things yet.
That's the problem with surrendering privacy based on the argument that you're doing nothing wrong. You're defining “wrong” according to the standards of today. But you're creating a permanent record that may be judged according to the standards of tomorrow.
The Person Watching Can Change Too
There is an even more serious version of this problem. Suppose you completely trust the people collecting your information today.
Fine.
What about the people who control it 10 or 20 years from now?
A database doesn't disappear when an administration changes, when a company is sold, when a new CEO takes over, when laws change, or when political attitudes shift. The information remains. And information collected for one seemingly benign purpose can later be used for another.
That is why the question we should ask whenever someone proposes collecting more information about us isn't simply: “Do I trust you?”
It's: “Do I trust everyone who might ever inherit this information?”
Those are completely different questions.
You may trust today's government. You cannot know tomorrow's government. You may trust today's employer. You cannot know who will own the company five years from now. You may be comfortable with today's social attitudes. But you have absolutely no idea what society will consider unacceptable when you're 70 years old.
Once information exists, you've largely lost control over the future circumstances in which it may be interpreted.
Privacy Gives Us a Statute of Limitations on Being Human
There used to be a natural expiration date on much of ordinary human behavior.
- We said stupid things.
- We associated with questionable people.
- We tried things that didn't work out.
- We adopted fashions that later embarrassed us.
- We believed things we eventually rejected.
And most of it simply disappeared. Human memory faded. Photographs sat forgotten in drawers. Conversations vanished the moment they ended. That forgetting served an important social function. It allowed the person we became to replace the person we had been.
Digital memory increasingly removes that possibility. The 55-year-old can be confronted indefinitely by the 19-year-old. The abandoned belief can compete with the current belief. The person you once were can become evidence about the person you supposedly are. And something society barely noticed when you did it can someday become evidence against you because society itself has changed.
That's why privacy isn't merely protection from people we distrust.
Privacy protects us from people we haven't met, governments that haven't yet been elected, social standards that evolve, and judgments that unfold in the future.
When someone tells me, “I have nothing to hide,” my response is simple:
Nothing to hide from whom?
And when?
— Steffen Patrick