What is privacy? And do we care enough to save it — even if we could? Those questions lurk in the background of any discussion about digital privacy. We feel a vague dread about what is being done with our data. But we aren’t sure exactly what harm is being done, or if anything significant is being lost.
Firmin DeBrabander, a professor of philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art, sums up the problem in his book Life After Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society: “We don’t know what to say, how to articulate or express the harm that is inflicted by widespread government and commercial surveillance.”
We have readily given up nebulous rights over our data for the conveniences of the digital economy. And many of us wilfully expose our lives on social media. But the uses to which our information is being put are opaque, the controls at our disposal (short of quitting the digital economy outright) too weak.
Like Carissa Véliz, who tackles the same conundrum in Privacy Is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data, DeBrabander takes this as a starting point. But the two reach very different conclusions. Life After Privacy argues that the genie is out of the bottle and we should look for other ways to protect the things that our ill-defined sense of “privacy” brought us. Véliz, an associate professor in the ethics of artificial intelligence at the University of Oxford, delivers a bracing call-to-arms to fight back against digital surveillance before it is too late.
If you’re one of those readers who gave up before getting to the end of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff’s doorstopper of an academic treatise, then these two rather shorter works are a good place to start.
The first step is to decide whether there is something at stake that’s actually worth fighting for. Life After Privacy does a good job of setting our angst in a historical or philosophical setting. “Privacy changes as cultural and economic systems demand,” says DeBrabander.
Rising prosperity has enabled us to shut out the rest of society in ways our ancestors couldn’t have imagined. But at the same time, technological change has created a shifting frontier. We may feel a vague sense of “creepiness” at seeing adverts follow us around the web. But there’s no reason we can’t learn to live with this, as we have with other perceived intrusions before, and retreat into new corners in our minds.
Since privacy has been so variable, are there any absolutes that we might consider worth defending? On that point, both authors are in resounding agreement: our individual autonomy.
In the digital world, data is destiny. The predictive algorithms that feed on our personal information are designed to anticipate our wants and needs, and project what we might do next. That means that the price we are presented with on an ecommerce site, or the decision we are given for a loan, is increasingly decided by machines.
Autonomy is also central to the preservation of democracy. “Privacy matters because the lack of it gives others power over you,” writes Véliz. Personalisation, far from being a useful tool to make the digital realm respond to our individual needs, is actually a technique “designed to tamper with your unique mind”.
At stake, DeBrabander warns, is “privileged access to your mental states”, as the philosopher Michael Lynch describes it. He adds, of our private mental space: “When others invade it, and peer inside, you are at risk of no longer being viewed as a unique person, a human individual; you are now some kind of object, liable to manipulation and abuse.”
Once much of our life is conducted on digital devices and networks, under the constant gaze of these systems, it is a tall order to think that we can maintain some inviolable personal space, some essential unknowability. Yet Véliz, for one, thinks it’s worth a try. She makes the important point that the results of technological “progress” are not inevitable, however much technologists like to suggest otherwise. It is up to us, she says, to determine if we want to carry on towards a future where we are under the control of machines. Much of our society still exists outside the digital realm, and there is still time to reset the rules.
Some of the proposals on her checklist for action certainly sound achievable. They include limiting the trade in personal information and capping how much data are collected in the first place. Curbing government surveillance will always be difficult, but it is a battle that will have to be waged constantly.
Other proposals, however, would require shutting down important aspects of the data economy. Véliz recommends banning targeted advertising, along with outlawing machines that use AI to draw “surreptitious . . . sensitive” inferences about us. Businesses and governments benefit too much from techniques such as these to make it likely that they would abandon them.
DeBrabander, by contrast, reckons that not only is privacy a thing of the past, but that it was probably overrated in the first place. The things we care about most — “autonomy and authenticity and free thinking” — can be achieved in other ways, he says.
He argues that to try to preserve a private space in which we can reach decisions untouched by outside influence is to fall for the myth of individualism, a “notion of the self that is philosophically suspect, if not altogether discredited”. Democracy would be on a more solid footing if we acknowledged our interdependence, he says. Rather than try to retreat into ourselves, we should each step forward and take a more active role in fighting for what we believe in in the public domain.
As their titles make clear, Life After Privacy and Privacy Is Power reach quite different conclusions about how best to fight back against the threat from digital surveillance. You are likely to be left, however, with a queasy suspicion that, given the creeping complacency created by our digitally induced comforts, we may no longer have the will to resist.
Life After Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society, by Firmin DeBrabander, Cambridge University Press, RRP£19.99, 180 pages
Privacy Is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data, by Carissa Véliz, Bantam Press, RRP£12.99, 288 pages
Richard Waters is the FT’s US West Coast editor
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