Why it Matters: A Moral Foundation
Privacy matters because you matter. You have inherent and intrinsic value as a human being. As a start, you should be respected, honored, and treated with dignity. You are a unique individual and you matter deeply to those around you. You have been given life and that should be defended.
You have the right to pursue your life on your terms with equal opportunity as any other human being in good standing with the laws and practices of our society and nation.
Our highest law in America maintains this truth as part of our cultural identity and legal system; you have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which all depend on honoring your privacy.
You further have the rights of free speech, practicing your religion, and to peacefully assemble with others, which all imply freedom from monitoring and interference from an outside body.
You have the right to privacy within your home as your private domain and sanctuary, or “castle” as some legal arguments have put it.
You have the right to be presumed innocent and to keep your property private from “unreasonable searches and seizures” that would otherwise allow for the forced discovery of things never intended for public disclosure that might be used to implicate, incriminate, or otherwise sanction you.
You have a right that protects you from self-incrimination, by which you can remain silent under accusation of others and you can withhold information that would otherwise implicate or incriminate yourself.
You have the right and the obligation to hold things back from public view and access. You have the right to be considered innocent unless and until due process through our justice system discovers evidence against you and renders a verdict of guilt, but only after you have exercised your right of self-defense.
But all of these rights that are dependent on honoring your privacy are in service to honoring you as a human being with inherent dignity and intrinsic value.
The moral premise for privacy begins with this: you matter.
Privacy Threats and Exploitation
Privacy matters because while you should be treated with respect, there are many evil people in this world who actually seek vulnerabilities in others that they can use to exploit them. They spy, listen, and intrude where they have not been welcomed or invited. They gossip and leak secrets. They seek information they can turn into a weapon, or use as leverage to force their will upon you or on others.
The malicious actors seek to learn what is spoken or known in confidence so they can use that information against us. This can damage our reputation, open us up to potential injury, or cause us to participate in things we would normally object to.
On the topic of coercion, consider if someone learns of a thing about you that you wish to remain a secret. If that person threatens to disclose that information unless you do something for them, you may feel obligated to comply in order to defend yourself.
On the topic of vulnerabilities, if there is something about you that you guard as a secret but which if known could leave you exposed to harm, some with evil intent would like to know so they can act when or where you are least able to defend.
Other secrets may be ones that are like passwords which grant someone access to or participation in certain aspects of your life that you wish to guard. In the digital world that literally means your service accounts.
Privacy matters because in today’s divisive and politically charged culture, what you say and do today, while perfectly legal and moral now, may become culturally or politically unacceptable tomorrow. When this happens in the digital age, the court of public opinion can try you via the social square and can levy punishment against you that can destroy all opportunities you have to pursue and enjoy life on your terms.
Malicious actors will seek out information you may have disclosed or spoken in confidence, in innocence (or ignorance), or with good intent, that they can later use against you.
Malicious individuals may in the future, seek information from your past, including information disclosed about you by others, that they can levy against you in order to disqualify or exclude you from opportunities or participation.
Privacy matters because there are fraudsters and predators online who have twisted pleasures and desires that will exceed your imagination, but seek ways to satisfy their dark desires. They seek images, videos, and audio that they can use either to create fake new personas using your likeness, or they use, circulate, and sometimes modify among communities of like fetishes.
There are many online accounts you will see in social media spaces that contain profile pictures and even many posts that are often stolen from the accounts of the individual represented, but they are used to create fake accounts that fraudsters use to lure unsuspecting people into relationships.
Privacy matters because in the digital age our personal information and property is distributed throughout the Internet and in the possession and control of other organizations who should safeguard it against unauthorized access, use, and abuse. However, sadly, most of these organizations do very little to protect our information and may even intentionally or negligently facilitate disclosure.
Malicious actors will seek to break in and steal this information wherever they can get it, piecing it all together until they have enough to conduct harm.
Privacy matters because your most personal information that uniquely identifies you is often used as a means to access society, goods, and services. We use our social security number to open financial accounts, or access medical services or records, or leverage government services. We use our physical attributes to identity us uniquely among others which can serve in validating access or attributing actions (good or bad).
Unfortunately, malicious actors seek out your private information so they can impersonate you and use your identity in order to fraudulently gain access to resources that you may be held accountable for. In claiming to be you, actions done literally in your name may damage you even though you were not involved in any way in the actions taken.
In recent years, China has expressed interest in obtaining biometric data among US citizens for reasons that remain debated, but with access to recorded finger prints as well as all information that uniquely identifies you they would have the ability to digitally and possibly physically take actions under the claim and evidence that it was you.
Privacy matters because governments have capabilities they can employ to forcefully and unknowingly monitor individuals via digital means and can gain access to information without our knowledge. While a government may today be managed by trustworthy individuals, our political divide domestically and globally is such that if the capability falls into the wrong hands, it can be used against us. To this end, there are nations of the world who operate online services and infrastructure who do not respect individual life nor property nor privacy. Indeed in China in particular, national law mandates that all citizens participate in digital espionage actions that support the state. In China, the government has lawful access to all information that traverses or is stored on systems owned and managed by Chinese businesses and individuals.
Malicious political actors can use the tools and powers of the government to monitor and track individuals toward political rather than moral or legal motives.
Privacy matters because today’s digital world of free products and services depends upon monetization of information that service providers can harvest by spying on your online activities. Everything you use your web browser for, every search, every click, every login, is being recorded and reported, unless you use a privacy focused browser. Within apps and websites, especially Google, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft, TikTok and other social or communication providers, your activity is constantly monitored and recorded and then either used by the provider to deliver a targeted product experience (including ads or content), or is sold to big data brokers who leverage it for the same. Often, this collected information is known as meta data, and it is Internet gold that nearly every service provider down to your provider of your Internet connection, wants to collect so they can sell.
These tech companies and the ad networks they administer use this information to create profiles of individuals and groups, so they can influence people individually and collectively. By knowing your history, preferences, habits, interests, associations etc. the platform providers can choose what sort of information or experiences they can send you, at what time, that are most likely to influence your attention and your actions. So your privacy also matters, even in the context of those delivering services that you benefit from.
The Digital World
The Problem of Ownership
In this digital world, it is critically important to remember that whatever is created, recorded, saved, and transmitted is preserved until it is permanently deleted. But whatever you transmit, either by intent, by force, or in ignorance, you lose control over. Others may be recorded, saving, preserving, forwarding, sharing etc. anything you have created digitally.
That can include documents you write, emails you have sent, messages you have sent, social media posts you have liked or commented on or shared, websites you have browsed to, purchases you have made, money you have transferred, searches you have run, accounts you have setup, accounts you have logged into, usernames and passwords you have used etc.
Once a digital version of your expression has been made and transmitted, you have lost ownership forever.
The Problem of Integrity
In addition to the problem of ownership, whatever you have transmitted can also be modified or represented to satisfy the intent of whomever is in possession. This is very common in the political, social, philosophical, and religious spheres of society where snippets of quotes are often taken out of context to misrepresent the original author’s meaning or intent.
In the era of AI, this misrepresentation can be extended into easy falsification. Images, videos, even audio recordings can be enhanced, changed, or fabricated in ways that create new meaning, or even create new events. If they are partially rooted in truth, then they can become very difficult to disprove or correct.
So when we lose ownership of our expressions, we also lose the integrity and authenticity of whatever it was we expressed.
The Problem of Authenticity
One of the other challenges we face in the digital world is that any of us can often supply any sort of identifying information in accounts we create. I can create an email address and social media account using any name I want to. No one validates that the real me matches the name I use or the persona I project online.
And so it can be that anyone you interact with online can bear the likeness of someone they are not. They can pretend. They can be playing a role that is totally unlike who they really are. They can use the image and likeness of others and leverage that information for relationship capital or access.
So when we engage in the digital spaces, we immediately lose the accountability inherent in the physical world and this can lead to any number of false representations and inauthentic experiences.
Know What to Protect
In the following sections we will outline what information needs to be protected specifically, along with tactics to protect it.
