The Why and How of Privacy and Security

CLO S:

Trigger warning: authoritarianism, state surveillance, the Holocaust. If you want to avoid these topics, please jump to the last paragraph of this introduction, starting with ‘Enough about the depressing stuff.’

Before we start, I feel like I need to give a bit of background on why I care so deeply about privacy. It’s partly historical. Being Ashkenazi, I learnt from a very young age about the importance of sensitive information, and who you give that information to. My grandfather broke the law by not going to the police station to register himself as a Jew. The Holocaust saw 76,000 Jews deported to death camps from France alone – around 1/4th of the country’s Jewish population at the time. There’s a chance that not being part of the Jewish census saved his life. Lesson: be careful who you give sensitive information to.

That grandfather and two of his brothers left Paris in the middle of the war, and took a train south with no plan, no luggage, no contact, and no destination other than, well, heading south. They were helped by strangers and survived. Their mother however, along with two other siblings, had a plan. They had a deal with a smuggler to reach unoccupied France. The smuggler informed the Nazis, and all 3 of them died in deportation. Lesson: each person who has information on you represents an additional chance for it to be leaked.

And yes, we can raise the irony of mentioning my Jewish grandpa to warn you against sharing sensitive information online. There, I just did. 

While this happened in the 1940’s, a data point’s lifespan is drastically different today. It’s possible that you posted something online 10 years ago, and it was fine back then, but 20 years from now you will hope that no one finds it. My message is: the Internet never forgets, cultures change, and retroactive laws exist. People can get screwed over digital data. Let’s take the obvious example: China’s state surveillance has an eye on literally each and every move of its inhabitants, whether physical or digital. The state uses extensive data to allocate social scores, which can have a drastic impact on Chinese people’s life, including banning them from purchasing train or plane tickets, providing them with lower Internet speed, and denying them visas and loans. China also makes use of this surveillance system against its Uyghur population, detaining between 1 and 2 million people – the estimates vary – in concentration camps, where prisoners suffer extensively reported torture, brainwashing and forced labour. 

Apart from governmental issues, there’s also the topic of pervasive tracking and ads, championed by Facebook and Google. I’m yet to see the difference between today’s digital advertising and individually-customised mass manipulation. Maybe because there is none. Please try and change my mind if you have any conclusive elements.