Privacy Inequality: The Most Brutal Form of Inequality You’ve Ever Imagined

Here's Yuval Noah Harari explaining it much better: https://youtu.be/Bw9P_ZXWDJU?t=269

His basic argument is that: 1) free will has always been an illusion, 2) it was an acceptable one because generally no one knew you better than you know yourself, 3) with the advent of mass data processing (call it AI if you want) the premise 2 breaks down, and we should be skeptical of trusting people's judgement. For example, the fundamental ideas underpinning liberal democracies and capitalism ("the customer is always right", "this is what voters want", ...) become unreliable.

"Simply put, your raw data is everything about you: your age, location, preferences, how tall you are, go down the list. But the tricky one is the predictability of your data. And what people when say that Facebook knows people better than they significant other (and themselves), is that they can predict what you’re going to do before you, or your significant other, are aware of it. That’s so powerful. When you get tons of data from a person and put the right algorithms to work, you can start getting interesting (or scary) results."

"Privacy becomes a human right in the moment someone or something invades your personal space (either physically or digitally) in order to extract monetary value from you. That’s our value as human beings, and companies and governments steal that value from us. What do we do? We just give away because we’ve got no idea of our own value as human beings." (great point: it's extraction)

"There are so many things you can do with data. Today. But, what could be done tomorrow with that same data? If today we can predict the mental health of an individual through a voice recording, what will we be able to do with that same data five years from now?"

Employers and governments are either considering or already doing stuff like that in ways that will surely impact workers.

"Here’s my prediction: At some point this situation will create two castes of people: The Protected and The Predictables... The Protected are the ones who can afford to pay for privacy. These group understand that their privacy is their very human value and want to protect it. However, The Predictables are the ones who can’t pay for privacy. These are ones who live in a Matrix style algorithm. Maybe they know privacy should be a human right, but probably will fail to understand its value and the impact it has on them. The ones who have lots of opportunities and resources will be given more. And the ones with few opportunities and resources will be taken away, even more"

"...it’s easy to see how this inequality is going to hit us: overpriced insurance, bank loans denial (or high interest), unaffordable healthcare, highly targeted advertising, political manipulation, and simple opportunity cost of opportunity."

"Because companies are too busy making money and we’re too busy using their “free” stuff. So it’s not surprising that they end up getting away with it. Consider Facebook. Since 2005 Facebook has been involved in all sorts of scandals, and every single time they get away with it. They masquerade their way out, telling one story to the investor and another to the public."

"Privacy inequality will take everything to the edges. Some kids will be lucky and might be able to afford privacy protection. Maybe that will be paying for products that watch their privacy or a kind of antivirus, who knows. But other kids won’t be able to pay for it and will choose the “free” option — others just won’t understand their value as human beings and will pick the free version, because it’s a bargain, right? Alas, they will grow up with inequalities worse that the one I had at school, or any other you have had in your entire life."

"We seem to forget that for decades we’ve been fighting for freedom and equality. Now we’re throwing it all away, and for what, free dumbass apps?"

Catchy title though.