I'm so going to become the nutcase of this forum after this post, or at least
one of them. Remember me the way you thought I was ...
My difficulty with losing privacy really isn't about the fact that my life is being tracked and used to sell me items. I'm one of those people (about 30% of humanity) that truly isn't
positively influenced by advertising.
The problem lies with the fact that people don't really understand that there is no such thing as
just data. The value in big data doesn't lie in the data itself, it lies in the information that can be
inferred from said data.
That's where things become more abstract, but also way more dangerous. Using the data that's in people's GMails, private Facebook chats and everything else is used to understand the target's emotional state. This
is basically marketing 101, but the same information can be used in much more sinister ways. In the past this was the terrain of intelligence agencies, using information to gain a way in to someone's
mind. To give you
one example: there have been studies about how easy it is to manipulate people into committing suicide. All it takes are a few orchestrated mishaps based on someones
past at the
right time and to provide the target's
most likely
method of choice. The parts in bold can be inferred from the data that people hand out to social media easily.
I could start raving about what other people do or do not understand, but I'd rather make people think for themselves. One question and followups I generally ask people (mostly irl) when this topic is brought up is the following:
would you be scared more if <known dictator from the past> had access to this technology that told him everything about yourself? If said dictator has a radically different set of ideas about things you find important, and is willing
to purge the world of people who do not agree with his version of ideas, would you still be comfortably giving out your data?
This risk is real today (and has been real in the entire past of humanity):
Look at Turkey, where Erdogan's police has used social media to identify 'threats' against his supreme reign based on what ngo's they supported (many linked to Gülen) and who they associated with.
Look at China, where all social media is essentially state-controlled to be able to identify dissidents and where their data will be used in the future to
score and
classify people into obedient and subversive groups.
Handing out your very thoughts to people you do not know is a folly. Handing out blackmail material is truly insane.
Would you be throwing all of your private mails, chats and whatever onto the streets? Would you hand out USB sticks with all your private data, every picture you've ever taken, every message you've ever sent to your friends
or even enemies on to anyone passing you by in the streets? If the answer is no, then why are you
doing the very same thing while you're reading this?
On a final note this: data does not expire. It's a false assumption to think that what I wrote/thought 10 years ago, is no longer relevant. Or rephrased, can be no longer used against me. I am still the same person and the
choices I made in the past, the experiences I had in the past still define me to this very day. People do not truly change, especially after their brain no longer grows (before 25y for most people). The information that
lies behind the data will remain relevant for ever.
Think about this: if in the future you're running for an important office and someone unearths something that you wrote 20 years ago in a drunk stupor, would you not be sorry about having kept all your data out there?
It's not because you think it might be irrelevant, that other people are going to think so. Especially the easily manipulated ones, like the typical voter, will care a lot.
When this happens to people right now, they have to think who may have made this public. In the future, you won't even have to think because you did it yourself. You'll think back to the times people didn't understand
the value of their data and come to regret the choices you made.