What is Privacy?

We frequently throw around this word, privacy. But can we define it?

As a concept I believe that privacy has many facets. Put bluntly; the clothes that I wear when I leave my house afford me privacy, my trust in other community members not to trick or harm me affords me privacy, and the software that I like most because it does not watch me affords me privacy.

If I think my partner is lying to me, and I watch them or read their messages without their knowing then I would be violating my partners privacy. If I found that my partner was being unfaithful in that search and that I had a reason to violate that privacy, then I might be applauded but if I found that I was being paranoid then I might be outcast. I believe that if I am dating someone then I should be able to simply ask, though I like to think I wouldn’t have to.

Similarly I may suspect someone of a crime, someone that I don’t know personally, and so I begin to watch them in secret to find out if my suspicion is true. I am breaking their privacy by doing this, and if it turns out that I am wrong then I think I should come clean and apologize for my behavior. But if I find out that I am correct, then I may be able to call it in to crime stoppers and get rewarded for it.

We have examples of when it is fair to give up your privacy and when it is not, and to me it feels reasonably clear when relinquishing privacy is necessary, depending of course on which privacy’s they are. I feel it is fair for stores to film me when I go inside so that they can make sure that nothing is stolen, and I can also appreciate noticing that a certain part of the store gets more traffic by watching patterns in the video feed. At some point though, this starts to feel like a violation. A person that sees me every day and knows what I like to order is hardly the same as a machine that watches my order every day and has it ready for me.

But I accept it and I move on, because of course the big burger business is trying to sell as many big burgers as they can as fast as they can.
I let my friends know where I will be because I trust them with my privacy. If something were to happen to me, I like to think my friends would be there to help me because they hadn’t heard from me in too long. I offer them this right to my privacy both because of my perception of them and because it provides me safety. There is vulnerability in trust.

And so when I find out that Instagram is paying such close attention to my every like and comment, or that Walmart uses specific lights to try to rush us out of the store because we impulse buy faster, or when I see tires suddenly appear as an ad on my phone within minutes of talking about needing tires with my friends, I begin to feel that my privacy is eroding over time. One burger recommendation was easy to swallow, but if you know that I was talking about tires you’d have to be listening to me all the time.

I carry a phone. In many ways we are tied to them. I often wonder if we went as many new places in the 90’s, I am quick to learn where a new friends house is, but I have no idea how I would get there the first time without Google maps. Despite how much I appreciate having a GPS with well beyond Garmin Nuvi level directions, all at no extra cost, I really wish I had more options than Android and Apple. They both almost exclusively own the Application market for mobile devices, so breaking away from their standards is effectively same as exiting entirely.

This lack of choice eats away at me and I often wonder if it isn’t a violation of privacy, or if that is the side effect of having monopoly owned tracking devices. Data is the name of the game these days, and unless you have extreme privilege, you are required to participate. I had one of the first gmail accounts, and I was excited to get one. It has taken me some of the longest hours to find pathways away from Google and their interconnected products. Replacing Google Drive is a nightmare.

But it would be silly not to have a Google or Apple account to use my phone, that’s the best way to get the phone to actually function the way I expect.
Some projects have maintained a focus on privacy by merely giving you the source code. Technically you can take Android and build one yourself, like Graphene OS has done. It seems interesting that Graphene has caught flack with the US government for it’s privacy features. In the case of federal agents not being able to search someones phone, it would have been irrelevant if the person hadn’t had a phone to begin with. So why is it that by having one of these devices we seemingly relinquish our right to privacy from the government.

Roe v. Wade says that we should have the right to make important decisions without government intervention, drawing from predecessors such as Eisenstadt V. Baird and Katz v. United States. But of course Roe v. Wade was overturned.

I think we are often tricked to giving up forms of our privacy, and that this era of life with a location tracker, camera, and microphone in my pocket has lead us to a place of dystopia that we can hardly see much like a fish doesn’t know it’s in water.
And in that dystopia, more blatant use of surveillance is on the rise. I am 32 years old and I remember going on adventures as a teenager and never noticing cameras. I remember seeing them crop up more and more. Nobody that I knew had a camera on their front porch, of course now we all do. Many of these cameras use a subscription service that affords you the use of their cloud to bring your doorbell camera feed to your phone without anymore work than twelve dollars per month.

For a long time the police have had network cameras that they have been able to use to track people as they see fit. CCTV surveillance is not young by any means. And hardly find it to be faultless.

Today AI is scanning our data. We aren’t building all of these data centers for better ChatGPT responses. We’re building for companies that use AI to sell data. In many cases that may just be a sloppy website that makes the company ten dollars for the one dollar they spent on the processing power. In other cases they might be using AI to form relationships in data, like where certain people like to get their coffee. I think it would be reasonable to cite the 4th amendment where I find this collection of data to be alarming and just plain creepy besides the fact that I don’t feel in physical danger.

And now we have cameras with AI either directly adjacent to them or in a piece of a data center that the respective company owns. CCTV cameras may as well be AI powered such that you can have an AI agent process the video feed in real time, not unlike these new Automated License Plate Readers do.

However you feel about AI and what it represents, this has several effects on our privacy. The first of which is that these cameras are not just recording us all of the time, they are actively making automated decisions based on what they see. In some cases this could be life saving; if a camera could recognize a crime and help put a stop to it in real time, surely the people involved would be thankful despite their loss of privacy. In other cases though it can be wrong and it can make bad decisions. The second of which is the physical hardware that these cameras are. Not unlike many products in America these days, these cameras are made to be deployed as quickly as possible, without regard for potential safety flaws. Many of these cameras use Wi-Fi to transmit data, which alone is laughable. Somebody with a good radio kit and a laptop could simply walk up to these devices and brute force the Wi-Fi, as has been recorded numerous times.

I think it is well past time that we say something about our eroding privacy, as it applies to most of the world by now. My having a product that can give me directions to an address should not relinquish my right to privacy such that the corporation that made the product can get directions to me.

We have forgotten as a society how to stand up to these giants. We have forgotten to even pay attention to rights that we still take for granted. There are extreme cases where citizens rights have been violated and all we have done for it is stand back and watch while we talk about how awful it is.

As I talk to each and every one of you, I find it resoundingly clear that we do not like to be surveilled. We do not like tire ads popping up because our phones listen to us, we do not like our location being broadcast to the highest bidder, and we do not like these Artificial Intelligence fitted Surveillance Cameras.

We want to talk about this democratically. We want to have a conversation about what is an acceptable amount of privacy to forego. We do not want these decisions made for us by our government when our backs are turned.