Privacy: One of the Most Fundamental Human Rights, yet Constantly Under Threat

Of course the state spies on you. After Edward Snowden everyone should know that. And thats a big problem because the state is the one actor that should fight to protect you from surveillance. But let's not claim that big tech is not the motor of the machine that is state sanctioned surveillance. Google allowed the US to read your e-mails. A yahoo software was responsible to access your webcam from the outside. NSO sold Pegasus to state actors.

That sounds bad enough. But if these companies would care about their users they would stop this from happening. Right? Of course these companies will tell you that they need your information to provide you with the best service. In reality they want to collect the biggest value as possible from you.

In the past you would just pay for a service and the service would provide a service. If the company wanted to extract more value from their users they would raise the prices. But today is different. It is no longer just a transaction between you and a company. It is also a transaction between the company and a third actor who is interested on spying on you.

The motivation changes. It is no longer about protecting you country or whatever. It is about money. And companies want to make money. And if companies see a legal opportunity to make more money they will take it. They will sell as much of your data as possible.

Now you will tell me that I should just stop using these services. But that's not so easy. Network effects are real. If they aren't real for you? Great. But other people have friends outside of tech circles. Now if you want to have a social life you need WhatsApp or other services. This is an even bigger problem in developing countries that are literally dependent on these "free" services.

Normal people wont buy a homeserver, self host a matrix instance and convert literally everyone in their friend group to element. They will go for the cheaper solution and just download WhatsApp. But they don't know that they are paying for this service with their data. E2EE? Yeah right, your Messages can only be read by me, you and Facebook.

This is why we are in dire need of anchoring privacy into law. People will go for the cheaper option. But if you are in need of using a service it should not come with strings attached. And if your service is only sustainable by selling the private correspondence of people it deserves to die. There is plenty of great OSS that just doesn't have the network effects of proprietary ones.

Privacy for the general public has always been considered a danger, and wasn't even a concern for the courts until technological advances removed any limits on how much even uninteresting people can be surveilled, and how easily massive amounts of that data can be kept and algorithmically searched through. But even in the old days, the government would find time to go through your mail to see if you were getting any information about birth control, then arrest you for it.

I wonder how people can watch old spy movies now, where spies had to smuggle money to other spies, they communicated with tiny strips of microfilm surreptitiously dropped into trashcans, etc., if they think that in the past, people could communicate freely with each other and transfer money willy-nilly? The battle that snoops are involved in now is the same as always, except with extremely overpowered tools and access. This access will not be limited, and these tools will not be dropped, because these tools can be turned on any politician who seriously wants to do that.

The way they see it is the same way they saw the made-up "missile gap." They look at China, and its government powers over civil liberties, and see it as an arms race that they're losing. If you're anti-surveillance, they see you as holding back the West in comparison, and wonder why you would want the bad guys to have access to tools that the good guys don't have. So they not only want more surveillance, they want to use it to track the people who are against more surveillance.

This is another self-serving narrative that motivates western elites to exaggerate the capabilities and immorality of US enemies, just like the missile gap was.

That said, our laws represent our values. We have a complete lack of tangible privacy laws and any ability to enforce them, and that doesn’t seem to be changing despite decades of these calls. GDPR delete requests are a joke because of the 17 marketing excel sheets with user exports floating around and forgotten in downloads folder that every tech company with user data has in some form.

Western culture, in its current form, doesn’t value privacy. It’s nuking privacy bc of tech-enabled capitalism and a decentralized mess of efforts to hit OKRs, love of social media by users, making that next VC raise, do that compliance check on user origin.

Everything about tech can’t function without that stream of user data. Every company is about tech now. Every company can’t function in its current profit mode without user data.

I’ve benefited greatly from capitalism, so I don’t get too bent out of shape. But you have to spend just one quarter with access to user-facing logs to know privacy is a lost cause, unless there is a significant reevaluation of tech regulations, and then you’d need the actual hammer-drop EPA in new 1970z style regulations. I don’t think we’ll get it.

So my conclusion is to protect yourself as able and otherwise ride the wave into what’s next.