Privacy online is becoming a lost ideal. And pretty much everyone who uses the internet is under a gloom of surveillance—one that constantly records and monetizes their data.
It’s no secret that privacy loss occurs all the time on the internet. And in many cases, it goes unnoticed. Users have come to acquiesce to the “privacy policy” of any app or service; the world as a whole, meanwhile, has slowly conceded more and more of our private data—often in the name of convenience or security.
Every single concession, every “I agree” clicked, piles up over time, and the climate of online privacy today is one with extraordinarily limited protection for the average user.
These losses of privacy often mean giving up sensitive, personal information to companies and governments. They involve tracking our behaviour. And they follow us across the internet, collecting bits of data that form a hefty dossier of private details.
Mostly Invisible
Most of the time, however, this goes ignored, even for people who are mindful of its existence.
The information is monetized to show personalized ads or recommend videos. Some of the largest tech corporations in the world, like Google (Alphabet) and Facebook, for instance, are also some of the largest advertising companies in the world. Corporate incentives drive them to know the user as well as they can—because with knowledge comes the power to influence our behaviour.
Yet just as this blends seamlessly into the background of our Google searches and website visits, it also becomes painfully apparent every time a headline appears with the phrase “data breach.”
Sometimes, personal information is just lost because of malicious third parties, who scrape data off large websites like Facebook, with billions of user accounts. Sometimes, hackers manage to leak private details. But at other times, it’s the companies themselves who actively participate in data collection—and with questionable intent.
Why We Should Strive for Privacy
Beyond just the potential for data loss, when personal details fall into the wrong hands, we should strive for stronger privacy protection. People with hostile intent can easily abuse information. We’ve already seen examples, as in the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal, where, without user permission, data was collected to help target political advertising campaigns.
Likewise, in normal use, advertisements can also push us to spend our money in crafted ways. Tailored recommendations, meanwhile, lure us into spending more time scrolling through feeds or watching videos, where companies can show us even more ads.
From Fiction to Reality
Several generations of dystopian fiction authors have warned about the control of information, when governments exert total control over citizens’ lives through continued surveillance and privacy loss.
Nearly a century ago, Yevgeny Zamyatin in We and Aldous Huxley in Brave New World imagined this; Orwell and Bradbury each also created their own worlds of elite government control. Modern authors and screenwriters have similarly followed, each with novel renditions of an all-too-familiar archetype: the totalitarian regime.
In these works, information and privacy loss become central tools to retaining power over people’s everyday lives. Today, however, a growing threat comes not only from the government and their monitoring of individuals but also from corporations incentivized to collect digital user data themselves.
When companies and governments misuse information, they can manipulate individuals’ behaviour with remarkable influence. Just consider how Google, controlling over 90% of search engine market share, can influence the webpages users access just by placing certain pages above or below others. Indeed, allowing a singular party to know too much about far too many people results in a drastic power imbalance. Simply trusting companies to act in people’s general interest is far from enough.
Above all, however, privacy should be a right. It should be a right in that all humans deserve a certain level of privacy, where their actions and information go completely unrecorded and unobserved. Moreover, it should be solely within our right to prevent privacy loss without inconvenience or having to give up our access to certain digital tools.
Onward
It is nevertheless important to recognize that much of the internet is free because of ads. But privacy loss and advertising are not mutually exclusive. New, privacy-oriented models of online advertising are emerging, fuelled by a transparent, open-source rebellion against tech giants. Individuals are becoming increasingly privacy-conscious, and rightly so.
Likewise, governments have taken increasingly strict measures. The EU’s GDPR, for one, has paved a way forward in data usage regulation (and this is the main reason for all the “accept cookies” buttons on websites). Many other countries, including Canada, have followed, realizing the need to update existing digital privacy laws.
However, many of these updates will take time: one proposed law from late last year, Bill C-11, has yet to make its way through Parliament. Other changes, meanwhile, have been further recommended but not taken at present.
Of course, in the online world, taking control of your privacy is important to both you and also the entire online ecosystem. Here are some resources to learn more about the steps you can take:
- “Your Technology Is Tracking You. Take These Steps For Better Online Privacy”, from NPR
- PrivacyTools provides secure alternatives to common software, tools, and web services
- Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
- Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit