Narrative: Declining Privacy and Security

Written: January 24, 2017

In the online era, privacy and security, things which were previously safeguarded in physical ways (shutters and blinds, locks and keys) can no longer be so protected. Instead, so much of what we’d like to keep private or secure doesn’t even exist physically, but only digitally, and access to it can take place without anyone ever entering our homes or approaching our person. In addition, business models for many of the products and services we use daily rely on us giving away a portion of our privacy.

Is it inevitable that both our privacy and security will be eroded in the online era? Yes, in a number of different ways, not least that much information which was previously held discretely in separate locations or databases can now be far more easily aggregated for a much more complete picture of who we are. But also because no digital system is foolproof, and highly motivated actors will always be trying to breach security and obtain information that either has inherent value or can be leveraged to deliver that value elsewhere.

None of this means we have to simply resign ourselves to our fates – we still have decisions to make about which services we will and won’t use based on both their attitudes towards and effectiveness in protecting our privacy and security. We can decide which information we willingly yield up, opt out of tracking and targeting, and vote with our feet and wallets when companies and their services let us down. We can choose products and services which choose not to track us, or which do such tracking at a local rather than global level, while protecting that local data effectively.

At the same time, many of us – especially in the younger generations – are much less concerned about privacy than others, and accept as a fact of life that some measure of privacy must be yielded up as a trade for free or cheap content or communication services. Some make those tradeoffs consciously, and some make them blissfully unaware that that’s what they’re doing, but we all make decisions about those tradeoffs one way or another.

We’ll see more security breaches as time goes on, and we’ll see companies push the boundaries in terms of user privacy. We’ll also see a range of responses to both of those things. The typical response to a security breach is a few days (or perhaps even just hours) of outrage, followed by short-term memory loss as we all fall back into our habits and patterns – this means most breaches don’t have nearly the impact they could, unless they’re repeated often enough to really scare users. We’ll also become more immune to privacy invasions over time, ceding more and more control over our privacy in return for greater personalization, more relevant advertising, or systems that promise to be more helpful to us.