I have nothing to hide, and other hilarious jokes you can tell yourself
Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
- Edward Snowden
Mass surveillance is a real issue these days, and those dumb enough to dismiss its importance also happen to be the ones who feed these flames Surveillance as a technique can only be achieved if the people agree to being surveyed. That being said, how hard is it really to refuse this system of surveillance? How much discomfort does using DuckDuckGo over Google search cause?
Exhibit A: How much is your data worth?
Facebook reportedly makes roughly $40 per year in ad revenue for each user who is subject to ads. The question is, would you be willing to pay $40 a year to Facebook for an ad-free and privacy-friendly experience? The answer is fuck no; you’d need to pay ~$120/month just to use the basic services that you’re currently using for free.
One could say you’re saving ~$120 on subscription services just by using your personal data as currency, but that is the fundamental issue with this business model. Your data would be almost completely worthless if it wasn’t being sold in bulk; in a way, your usage is what values your data.
Exhibit B: Threat models
People tend to have different definitions and needs of privacy, we call these “Threat models”, the threat models essentially define the length a person is willing to go to to preserve their online privacy and hide their digital fingerprint. If you’re a social figure who happens to have a dire need of hiding their identity, you’re definetly compromise less and less of your privacy in order to fulfill your needs. However, us average Joes, might not want to remain completely anonymous, and that defines our threat model, but there are always reasons to exercise more privacy, one of them being Exhibit C, which I’ll write about shortly. One of the main reasons that privacy is out of the question for the common folk, is that the privacy-friendly alternatives to most services fucking suck; take Instagram, for example, which is an absolute privacy nightmare, and there are no good alternatives for it. Another service, like Google Search, has a decent alternative called DuckDuckGo, but that’s not always the case. Most people aren’t willing to compromise their comfort for privacy, and that’s a problem; In order to not make every service a subscription there would need to be “Some” data collection, and most people are okay with that.
But holy shit Facebook, Installing Root CA certificates on devices so you can intercept and track all their Snapchat traffic? 1
Exhibit C: No Safe Safe Enough
Imagine if you had a book with everyone’s darkest and deepest secrets in it, And everyone in the world knew that you had that book. Your first issue would be how to store it, and the truth is, you’re fucked; there’s no way to store it. The only correct way to make sure this book does not reach the hands of a threat actor would be to destroy the book. Imagine you’re Google; you know everything about everyone; you even know that John Doe clicked on a “Single MILFs in your area” ad ten years ago. Imagine you’re John Doe, and there’s some creepy guy named Google watching your computer through the window every day and taking notes every time you search the web. What would you do? Get blinds? But he already has all those notes; shoot him? What if he has more copies? My point is, there’s no safe secure enough to hold such a book, and definitely no server safe enough to store it, if one threat actor, a singular person, manages to get access to this database, the entire world is FUCKED. Imagine the chaos, the elaborate scams, and the theft that the threat actor would be capable of. Thinking about it is mind-blowing.
Conclusion
Your data is the most valuable thing about you online, and it’s not just you either, you often have links and data on those around you, your ignorance might lead to someone else’s despair one day, and it’s best to try to avoid that. One way that can be done is by slowly replacing your tools with more privacy-focused alternatives, and over time, if these genres of tools get popular enough, they will make enough money so that more tools and services can have privacy-friendly alternatives. Change starts right here, right now.