Privacy

We have grown used enough to this world by now: we no longer care about freedom, or about privacy. We value ourselves less and less, living under ideas that were handed to us as the right ones. We do not mind that people know what we do, who we are and what we want. We share everything. This is a change that many tend to take lightly — the fact that we are on file has been normalised by now. The world is built on top of the very tools that make this a reality.

A sentence often attributed to Richard Stallman goes:

If Stalin could give one thing to all of his citizens, he would certainly give them a phone.

The phone is a tool that has become an extension of the body for many people, and for others a fundamental part of life. There are even those who panic when they leave the house without it. But how did all this happen? We went from a time when you could leave home for months to a moment in which people are used to hearing from each other every second of their lives. It does not matter where you are: we are always connected. This makes it an extremely effective surveillance tool. It is a point where a great deal of our information is centralised: photos, location, chats, interests, payments and searches. It becomes, in fact, a stand-in for our identity, almost a unique identifier.

Take Vault 7, a data leak published on WikiLeaks in 2017, containing around 8,700 CIA documents — papers and technical material describing the cyber-espionage capabilities used between 2013 and 2016. That leak documents how the CIA could access various computing devices, phones among them, often with very broad permissions. This is one of the myriad resources showing that phones are among the most effective instruments of surveillance and control over users. Their effectiveness has grown in recent years thanks to social platforms and to increasingly aggressive algorithms, which can create dependency and isolate the user inside an echo chamber.

Many hold to the philosophy of "I have nothing to hide", a line of thought that is in itself worrying and dangerous for freedom. Privacy is not a tool reserved for those who have something to hide: it is a fundamental right that concerns everyone, because we all hold personal information we want to protect — from political opinions to health, from intimate relationships to our tastes. To think that privacy only serves the guilty is to ignore that it protects the dignity and the autonomy of every individual. Surveillance is never neutral. Even those who have nothing to hide change their behaviour when they know they are being watched. Knowing that every message, every movement, every conversation can be monitored induces self-censorship, fear of expressing ideas and limits in social relationships. This effect, known as the chilling effect, shows that privacy is not a luxury but the very condition of freedom. Moreover, data that looks harmless can become dangerous. A photo can be used as a deepfake, a message can be pulled out of context, a health record shared today can be reused, manipulated or reinterpreted tomorrow — turning what seems harmless into a concrete risk. Giving up privacy means ignoring that personal information has value and can be used against us, even when we have done nothing illegal. Privacy does not protect only the individual, but society itself. When everyone gives up control over who can reach their information, the power to manipulate grows, and so does the possibility of abuse and our collective vulnerability. It is like saying that locks on doors are useless because we would not steal anything: a lock does not protect the ill-intentioned, it protects everyone, because the risk exists regardless of individual intentions.

Saying “I have nothing to hide” therefore means handing yourself over to someone else's control, and ignoring that privacy is not a means to hide guilt but an indispensable shield for living freely — for being ourselves without interference and without fear. Privacy is the guarantee of being able to live as complete human beings, free to think, speak and choose without anyone controlling our every move.

That sentence only serves to justify the laziness of not opposing this system. People often do not go further and, even when they do, it does not really solve the problem. There are many incomplete promises, services that promise privacy. To name a few: ProtonMail, an email service with less data collection (telemetry), and GrapheneOS, an encrypted, open source system without Google. While it is true that services of this kind solve some problems in themselves, they do not solve others — such as email as an identifier, which can always be traced through a pattern, or SIM cards and Wi-Fi that always give away our position, and many other small forgotten details. This is not to say that services and operating systems like Proton and GrapheneOS are not sound; it is to say that they are not the solution.

Another criticism made of privacy is: "Surveillance makes cities safer." While from a certain point of view this is true, it is not the only method. What we have to ask ourselves is: "How much are we willing to give in order to be safe? How far can surveillance go in order to make us safe?" The world of 1984 (Orwell) was safe too — but what did man lose in exchange for that safety? Fundamentally, the point is that this approach to safety costs us fundamental human rights. A better approach would be to do the same things you would do by eliminating privacy, but while keeping it. For example, cameras with an AI that detects crimes can be built without collecting people's data or their faces, without identifying them, processing everything locally. The same goes for local and home cameras. Not collecting data does not automatically imply that we have to give up modern safety controls, which can also be very useful when paired with police forces that are available and quick.

For some time now the various agencies and governments have wanted to attach an identity to every person on the network. This wish, while already satisfied in practice, now wants to be normalised and made easy as well. All of it happens through surveillance laws presented as tools to protect children, using their protection also as a form of psychological pressure on opponents. The Online Safety Act is one of the laws that declares it wants to protect children. The aim is legitimate, but we have to question the tools used to reach it: this system requires every social platform to have a way of verifying a person's age, through a face scan or through an identity document. It goes without saying that this has nothing to do with protecting children, since several methods to protect them already exist, such as the various parental control systems the platforms make available. These tools, instead, mainly serve to make surveillance easier and to make the link between a real identity and a person's online activity feel normal.

The question of privacy, then, is not only about what we have to hide, nor does it consist in a choice between technology and freedom. It is about the power we grant to those who collect our information, and about the possibility of setting limits to that power. A safe society should not necessarily be a society in which everyone is watched, just as a free society should not be forced to give up safety. The real challenge is to build systems capable of protecting us without turning every citizen into a subject to be controlled.

Privacy is not the possibility of hiding something wrong. It is the possibility of having something that remains ours. And if we give up that possibility completely in exchange for safety and convenience, the risk is not only that someone may come to know our life: it is that, slowly, we forget that this life belongs first of all to us.