Give Me My Privacy Back!
Leave me alone, tech.
For me, the terminal moment in the evolution of technology — when it turned from good towards something else — was when we were networked. Not just the tech — the whole point of the internet was that it was networked, after all — but us.
One day, security was all about multiple-factor authentication on our private personal devices; the next, everything was off in the cloud.
One day, I was storing my first drafts and embarrassing poetry on a hard drive that I might as well have kept in my sock drawer; the next, it had all been copied into the cloud somewhere.
Never mind AI eating all our writing and coming out with rubbish (actually, if it was using my adolescent poetry, that’s not so surprising); and never mind today’s arguments about copyright. Suddenly they took all our stuff and put it in their cupboard. Sorry, “cloud”. White and fluffy. Not dark at all.
It was all madly authorised, no doubt, by those forests of small print that we used to click past. Can’t argue against it on those grounds. But it was the biggest change of all. And nobody talks about it.
They took our data, and in doing so, they gave themselves access to us. Our private moments. Everything.
They put themselves inside our personal boundaries.
And in doing so, ruined everything. Online therapy is a good idea — until you remember that there’s nothing to stop a network administrator from listening in.
The world is a bugged room. Our privacy itself is bugged.
I opened up the Notepad app on my phone the other day, on a walk, and a pop-up told me that I couldn’t take a note yet because the network wasn’t ready. The network wasn’t ready? This is my note! Private!
Wasn’t there a DNA company a few years back — one of those trust-the-science pop-up outfits that collects your saliva and tells you that you’re descended from Genghis Khan — that had to be told, my bold italics, not to sell its customers’ private DNA data?
And of course politics. And the surveillance economy. We didn’t consent to any of this (except — small print).
My guess: the tech companies realised that they couldn’t do security at an individual level, so they just reached in and took our stuff and told us they were securing it in their specially secure data warehouses.
Where the security breaches would be less conspicuous.
Although they didn’t say that.
I’ve written before about data security. Short version: our data isn’t secure. Longer version: it’s somebody else’s asset now, and we let that happen.
But that’s only the half of it. I’m writing this online. All my keystrokes are visible. My “creative process” (ha!) is out there. All my false starts, all my attempts at humour…
Do we even remember what privacy was?
