Cegłowski argues that we need a new conceptual framework for thinking about privacy. Too often, he says, "privacy still means what it did in the eighteenth century—protecting specific categories of personal data, or communications between individuals, from unauthorized disclosure."
This definition is too limited, given the current reality of the Internet.
For the most part, we don't need to worry about our private conversations being disclosed to others. In fact, Google and the other tech behemoths spend considerable money making sure that doesn't happen.
Cegłowski writes that we should worry, however, about a more pervasive intrusion into our personal lives. He coins the phrase "ambient privacy" to describe the (large) part of our lives that we used to rightly consider our own. I love his explanation:
Ambient privacy is the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered.
What we do at home, work, church, school, or in our leisure time does not belong in a permanent record. Not every conversation needs to be a deposition.
Until recently, ambient privacy was a simple fact of life.
Recording something for posterity required making special arrangements, and most of our shared experience of the past was filtered through the attenuating haze of human memory. Even police states like East Germany, where one in seven citizens was an informer, were not able to keep tabs on their entire population. Today computers have given us that power.This is a great insight. One of the massive changes wrought by the Internet is the way in which our lives have "gone public" -- if not for others to actually read and review, then at least to be stored and potentially retrieved for commercial purposes (ie, our browsing history).
Cegłowski continues by arguing that tech companies claim that people are ok with the new reality. In fact, individuals are powerless to make a decision one way or the other:
Because our laws frame privacy as an individual right, we don’t have a mechanism for deciding whether we want to live in a surveillance society. Congress has remained silent on the matter, with both parties content to watch Silicon Valley make up its own rules. The large tech companies point to our willing use of their services as proof that people don’t really care about their privacy. But this is like arguing that inmates are happy to be in jail because they use the prison library. Confronted with the reality of a monitored world, people make the rational decision to make the best of it.
That is not consent.Cegłowski compares privacy law to environmental law, which has taken decades to slowly but inevitably evolve. I wonder whether politicians will, at some point, begin advocating for a new legal (and conceptual) framework to restore a sense of "ambient privacy." At this point in the digital revolution, I am pessimistic.
