WHY PRIVACY MATTERS

WHY PRIVACY MATTERS

I am certain that every one of us has had some experience that we are being watched on the net. This World Wide Web is grounded in that there are three kinds of people, good people, bad people and the hackers.

So, the question of why privacy matters, is a question that has arisen in the context of a global debate, enabled by the revelations of Edward Snowden that the United States and its partners, has converted the Internet, once heralded as an unprecedented tool of liberation and democratization, into an unprecedented zone of mass, indiscriminate surveillance.

Good people are people who go to work, come home, surf the internet, and watch television. They use the Internet not to plot bombing attacks but to read the news or exchange or connect for business leads. These good people are doing nothing wrong and therefore have nothing to hide and no reason to fear the government monitoring them.

Bad people are those who use the internet to attack or who engage in violent criminality and therefore have reasons to want to hide what they're doing, and they have reasons to care about their privacy. 

The hackers are people who engaged in a very extreme act of intrusion for gains in espionage activity and ripping innocent people of their savings. 

The subject matter is pretty straight forward. When asked about all the different ways Google is causing invasions of privacy for hundreds of millions of people around the world, longtime CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt interview in 2009 said; “If you're doing something that you don't want other people to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg, who in an infamous interview in 2010 pronounced that privacy, is no longer a "social norm." Mark and his wife purchased not only their own house but also all four adjacent houses in Palo Alto for a total of 30 million dollars in order to ensure that they enjoyed a zone of privacy that prevented other people from monitoring what they do in their personal lives.

I am certain that what it means to be a free and fulfilled human being is to have a place that we can go and be free of the judgmental eyes of other people.

There are all sorts of things that we do and think that we're willing to tell our physician or our lawyer or our psychologist or our spouse or our best friend that we would be mortified for the rest of the world to learn. We make judgments every single day about the kinds of things that we say and think and do that we're willing to have other people know, and the kinds of things that we say and think and do that we don't want anyone else to know about. People can very easily in words claim that they don't value their privacy, but their actions negate the authenticity of that belief.

There’s a reason why privacy is so craved universally and instinctively. It isn't just a reflexive movement like breathing air or drinking water. The reason is that when we're in a state where we can be monitored, where we can be watched, our behavior changes dramatically

This is just a fact of human nature that has been recognized in social science and in literature and in religion and in virtually every field of discipline. There are dozens of psychological studies that prove that when somebody knows that they might be watched, the behavior they engage in is vastly more conformist and compliant. Human shame is a very powerful motivator, as is the desire to avoid it, and that's the reason why people, when they're in a state of being watched, make decisions not that are the byproduct of their own agency but that are about the expectations that others have of them or the mandates of societal orthodoxy.

The conclusion that we can reach, is that a society in which people can be monitored at all times is a society that breeds conformity and obedience and submission, which is why every tyrant, the most overt to the most subtle, craves that system. Conversely, even more importantly, it is a realm of privacy, the ability to go somewhere where we can think and reason and interact and speak without the judgmental eyes of others being cast upon us, in which creativity and exploration and dissent exclusively reside, and that is the reason why, when we allow a society to exist in which we're subject to constant monitoring, we allow the essence of human freedom to be severely crippled.

Credit: Glenn Greenwald 

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