All the world’s a stage, yet what happens when there is no more ‘backstage’? On the surveillance state and having nowhere to hide (from creditors, taxmen, states and corporations), and conversely, on the benefits of transparency. Do we really want to live in for-profit private city-states? Does your government really need to know who you are sleeping with? Is perfect information a worthy goal? And what about businesses? Do companies have a right to know their competitors’ secrets? What about the secrets of their consumers – or employees? And where does one draw the line? This essay looks at the trade-offs between privacy, security and costs, and calls for more informed consent when it comes to the trade-offs between trading our privacy for freedom, or free stuff.
I don’t know about you, but I love secrets. I am a defender of imperfect information and an advocate for the right to privacy.
Why be concerned about privacy if you have nothing to hide? If you have committed no crimes and have lived a blameless life with nothing to be ashamed of, you should theoretically have no need for secrets at all.
Or perhaps you’ve given up on the practicality of privacy. Perhaps you believe that technology has rendered privacy impossible or even undesirable from a social good perspective.
Perhaps you simply believe that privacy is unimportant.
I, however, believe all those views are wrong. I believe privacy is a right worth protecting, for both personal and professional reasons.
We all have secrets. I know I certainly do.
We all have things that we don’t want anyone else to know.
Things like: how much money we have (or don’t). A closely guarded family recipe. The embarrassing guilty pleasure we take in listening to cheesy 90’s pop music. How much time we spend scrolling through social media feeds. Who we are (really) in love with. The affair we had at a particularly vulnerable time in our marriage. The distressing diagnosis we just received from our doctor. Where we buried the bodies (figuratively speaking, of course).
And the truth is, without some secrets, without a private inner life, we lose our sense of self. The boundaries between our inner and outer lives are in many ways what really make us individuals in the first place. As such, privacy is a key part of freedom and free will.
More so, privacy is a right that should be enjoyed equally by all. Privacy should not be a luxury reserved only for those rich enough to reside behind high walls and build bunkers out of sight of the all-seeing satellites that spy on us from above. Privacy, the right to withhold information and the right to be forgotten are not trinkets or status symbols, they are a requirement for human flourishing.
Regarding the right to be forgotten, we should be able to walk into our futures without the mistakes of our past dictating our access to opportunity. That’s not to say that we should not pay for our crimes or take responsibility for our sins, but rather that once our debt to society is paid, once we have done our time, we should be afforded the luxury of a clean slate and the chance to reinvent ourselves on our own terms. After all, who among us is not embarrassed by a former action in our distant history we would never dream of repeating?
Increasingly, though, our indelible digital footprints follow us around throughout our lives. We have no privacy from our past. This means we are unable to reinvent ourselves and we are unable to forgive and forget the transgressions of those around us.
Does a young female politician deserve to have her future career destroyed because of a topless photograph taken when she was a teenager? Does a 50-year-old man deserve to have the unwise words he wrote in jest in his youth on his social media profile follow him to the grave?
No. Perhaps we should agree that our personal past is best preserved with imperfect information. Some things are best forgotten, or at least best not exposed to the general public.
Similarly, the trend towards perfect information is also pushing us towards social cooling. Social cooling refers to self-censorship in exchange for social acceptance. This global social cooling is the cumulative long-term negative effect of living in the quantified reputation economy without the right to be forgotten – where our every action, thought, tweet and like is surveilled, recorded, scrutinized and used to rank our place in society.
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. In a society where no one is prepared to step out of line, the cost of dissenting from the majority grows exponentially.
If there is nowhere to escape from the big data dragnet and our lives are always under scrutiny, from smartwatches, city street cameras and live-streaming social media services, if we are always on stage, on view, being judged and there is no more backstage or offstage, where will any of us feel safe to be ourselves? A world where everyone is always watching everyone else for cues on how to behave and what opinions to hold is a world where innovation slows and eventually stops. A world in which mistakes are never forgotten is not a world where risk-taking and creativity are encouraged. The pervasive culture of conformity stifles creativity and innovation as much as it does free speech – if no one is prepared to take a chance on a new idea that might end in failure or ridicule, the long- term effect is to ‘cool down’ society’s growth and development.
This point alone should be of concern to anyone interested in a future that is more prosperous than the present.
We need to resist the inertia of social cooling. As we are monitored and nudged into complacency by omniscient technology monitoring a society that never forgets or forgives, we need to fight for the right to be imperfect, make mistakes, take chances and stand out. This lack of privacy is not good for both the individual and for society at large.
Of course, one of the big arguments against privacy is that a lack of privacy is for the greater good. We are encouraged to accept, nay even welcome, ubiquitous street level and online surveillance as a method of both deterring and catching criminals. In many countries, citizens are encouraged to submit to cell phone location and contact tracing to monitor and prevent the spread of contagious disease. We are encouraged to share our likes, opinions and purchase history with advertisers and businesses in exchange for more targeted offers tailored to unearthing and meeting our unique needs and desires. We are expected to share our grocery lists, our exercise habits, our step counts and even (as is likely in the not too distant future) our DNA with our insurers and banks in exchange for gentle nudges and rewards for good behaviour.
This sounds all well and good at first; however, when we take the time to consider the deeper exchange at play, privacy sacrificed for the greater good might not be so benign after all.
Think about it. Asking innocent citizens to give up their privacy and submit to state surveillance and location tracking through devices that are to all intents and purposes tantamount to ankle monitors in their phones is essentially assuming all citizens are guilty until proven innocent. Of course crime rates would decrease if you put your entire population under constant surveillance. However, is the security of the resulting gilded cage worth the price paid? Should the majority of innocent souls have to pay for the sins of the few with their dignity? Perhaps not.
Or what about the implicit inequality present in any commercial trade of personal data or privacy in exchange for access to goods or services? It is obvious that the poorer and more disadvantaged among us would be under more pressure to give up their secrets and themselves in exchange for a living than would the rich; and for a lower price too. A poor man could be persuaded to submit to state surveillance and strict behavioural rules in exchange for a universal basic income – or even for a discount on a data bill. A rich man, however, can afford to hold on to his secrets and reject surveillance as a means to survival.
Indeed, there are marginal returns to wholesale voyeurism.
Because although public health, safety, security and productivity are good and reasonable goals, the increasing trade-off with our personal privacy and freedoms results in ever-diminishing, marginal returns of those same common goods in exchange for an ever-greater price.
For every drop of our real selves, our secrets and our freedoms that we sacrifice on the altar of the greater good, we get less and less individual security in return.
Ultimately, the resulting greater good is not all that good, or all that great, if it comes at the cost of punishing the innocent along with the guilty.
Now, even if sacrificing one’s privacy to the greater or individual good is in some way justifiable from a social justice perspective (who could argue against saving a life at almost any price?), there is still the commercial question of imperfect information to consider.
Adverse selection refers to when one side of a trade has access to materially significant information hidden from the other side of the trade that, if known to both parties, would have affected the price and terms of the deal. For example, a second-hand car sales person who knowingly sells an unsuspecting buyer a ‘lemon’ (that is, a defective vehicle), or a smoker taking out medical insurance without informing their insurer of their risky habit. Theoretically, perfect information solves this problem. If both sides of a trade have access to all the information regarding the quality and the risk of the trade, adverse selection should no longer apply. This is superficially a good argument against privacy, particularly when it comes to withholding health and habit information from insurers and states (where states are responsible for funding medical bills).
However, when you consider the problem from a wider perspective, we find that all that has really changed from an insurance perspective is that adverse selection has shifted from the buy side of the market to the sell side of the market. Consider a case where an insurer insists on a DNA test to determine the likelihood of a particular individual developing a genetically linked disease. This access to perfect information makes sense from the insurer’s perspective, as the invasion of the client’s privacy and personal bio data allows the insurer to make a better risk analysis and set more perfect premium prices. However, this sort of testing also means that the insurer who has access to the test results and to the actuarial models that determine the risk profile of the prospective client also has a perverse incentive to withhold that same risk profile from that same prospective client. The prospective client would not have access to the same analytical tools and tests as the insurer.
Now, we could take this example further and suggest that it should become law that both the buy and sell side of such a trade be forced to disclose all their relevant information. We could suggest that insurance clients should be obligated to share their bio data, their diet, their health habits and their movements with their insurers. We could mandate trackers in our bodies, in our fridges and in our cars to ensure the information provided to our insurers is perfect. At the same time, we could mandate that insurance companies share their workings with their clients and the public at large. We could insist that DNA test results and actuarial models are completely transparent. But then, as we look ahead to a world where truly perfect information becomes possible, we run into another problem. If both sides of the market have access to perfect information, as that source data becomes more and more complete, and those prediction models become more and more accurate, we find ourselves painted into a corner. If insurers and their clients have access to practically perfect information, why should anyone purchase such an insurance policy at all? As the price of insurance premiums approaches the actual cost of the risk with increased accuracy, the incentive to take out insurance at all approaches zero…
Yes, this is an extreme hypothetical example, but the principle of how reducing uncertainty reduces profitability is still a useful thought exercise, highlighting the intrinsic commercial value of privacy.
Then we come to competition.
There is an old business adage that says that the margin is in the mystery. This is sage advice. When it comes to competitive advantage, commercial secrets – privacy – is where profitability lies. Whether you are a consultant selling processes and procedures, or you are a sugary drinks company selling a beverage made to a secret recipe or patented formula, the mystery makes the margin.
Imagine that all companies were forced to expose their secrets. Imagine that each firm was forced to disclose the salaries they paid to each and every staff member. Imagine that every company was forced to disclose the exact details of their product costings, formulas, supply chain contacts, deal terms, strategic plans, boardroom minutes, markups and margins to the general public (and their competition). Imagine how much value would be removed from the marketplace, along with the mystery.
So much of success lies in the secret source.
It is not impossible to imagine a future where many of the privacy erosions listed above come to pass. A world where transparency is the norm and all individual secrets and mysteries – be they personal, professional or commercial – are sacrificed for the greater good.
But now cast your mind even further forward to a world where human minds become connected to the connected cloud, and neurological implants can both receive and transmit information to the Internet. In other words, a world where perfect information is ubiquitous and inescapable. In this super-connected future, there would be nowhere to hide any secrets, not even within the privacy of your own thoughts. In such a world, even thinking out of line would be close to impossible, as you would be constantly connected and constantly exposed to the meta-consensus of the entirety of the Internet of People. There would be no individuality, and no escape from the omniscient all.
Yes, such a vision does appear to be highly speculative. However, neuroscientists and technologists working on ‘Brainternet’ projects believe that such a fantastic internet of all the people is indeed possible. Some even believe it is desirable to build such a world of perfect information; they believe that if we could all know and understand each other’s thoughts and innermost secrets, world conflict would cease and we could finally achieve global harmony – true consensus.
But at what cost?
I’ll leave you to decide if you find such a logical eventual conclusion to the eradication of individuality and privacy to be a utopia or a dystopia.
That said, I hope that this essay has at least enabled you to understand the personal and economic value of a little secrecy in the present world we live in.
Privacy is not dead, but it is on life support. I for one would like to see it pull through. And not just for those rich enough to pay for the privilege either.
After all, we dance differently when no one is looking. We dream differently when no one is listening in.
There is magic as well as margin in the mystery.
From The Future Starts Now.