So far, privacy isn’t a debate
Remember the dot com boom?
Doesn’t matter if you don’t. What does matter is that it ended. All business manias do.
That’s why we can expect the “platform economy” and “surveillance capitalism” to end. Sure, it’s hard to imagine that when we’re in the midst of the mania, but the end will come.
When it does, maybe then we can have a “privacy debate.” Meanwhile, there isn’t one. In fact there can’t be one, because we don’t have privacy in the online world.
We do, however, in the offline world, and we’ve had it ever since we invented clothing, doors, locks and norms for signaling what’s okay and what’s not okay in respect to our personal spaces, possessions and information.
That we hardly have the equivalent in the networked world doesn’t mean we won’t. Or that we can’t. The Internet in its current form was only born in the mid-’90s. In the history of business and culture, that’s a blip.
Really, it’s still early.
So, the fact that websites, network services, phone companies, platforms, publishers, advertisers and governments violate our privacy with wanton disregard for it doesn’t mean we can’t ever stop them. It means we haven’t done it yet, because we don’t have the tech for it. (Sure, some wizards do, but muggles don’t. And most of us are muggles.)
And, since we don’t have privacy tech yet, we lack the simple norms that grow around technologies that give us ways signal what’s okay and what’s not okay. We’ll get those when we have the digital equivalents of buttons, zippers, doors, locks, shades and door knockers and bells.
This is what many of us have been working on at ProjectVRM, Customer Commons, the Me2B Alliance, MyData and other organizations whose mission is getting each of us the tech we need to operate at full agency when dealing with the companies and governments of the world.
I bring all this up as a “Yes, and” to a piece in Salon by Michael Corn (@MichaelAlanCorn), CISO of UCSD, titled We’re losing the war against surveillance capitalism because we let Big Tech frame the debate. Subtitle: “It’s too late to conserve our privacy — but to preserve what’s left, we must stop defining people as commodities.”
Yes, that. Also what he calls “optimism and activism.” In the latter category is code. Specifically, the digital equivalents of clothes, doors, locks, bells and knockers.
Some of those are in the works. Others are not—yet.
If you want to help, join one or more of the efforts in the links four paragraphs up. And, if you’re a developer already on the case, let us know how we can help get your solutions into each and all of our digital hands.
For guidance, this privacy manifesto should help. Thanks.
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