I don’t know about you, but I cannot live without a few secrets.
Without secrets, without a private inner life, we lose our individuality and our sense of self.
Today though, we are bombarded with messages telling us that privacy is worth sacrificing for the greater good; for the good of community security, for the good of accurate marketing data, for the good of city planers’ productivity.
To those that say those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear, I say enough is enough. This far and no further.
Because although safety, growth and productivity are reasonable goals, the increasing trade off with our personal privacy results in every diminishing – marginal – returns of those common goods.
For every drop of our real selves and our secrets that we sacrifice on the altar of the greater good, we get less and less in return.
Ultimately, the resulting greater good is not all that good, or all that great.
With every device we connect to our bodies, with every camera we install to watch our public (and, increasingly, private) spaces, we give up more of the shadows and contours that make us who we are. We behave – indeed even think – differently when we know we are being watched, nudged to the lowest common acceptable denominator…
Before we know it, we will have nothing left of ourselves which is truly our own.
The world does not deserve all of you.
Privacy is a right worth fighting for.