They’re listening to us too much, and watching too. We’re not happy about it. The feeling is appropriate but we’ve been unclear about why we feel it.

[Note: This is adapted from a piece called Privacy Primer that I published on Medium in 2013. I did this mostly because Medium was new and shiny then and I wanted to try it out. But I’ve repeatedly wanted to refer to it and then when I looked, wanted to fix it up a little, so I’ve migrated it back to its natural home on the blog.]

This causes two problems: First, people worry that they’re being unreasonable or paranoid or something (they’re not). Second, we lack the right rhetoric (in the formal sense; language aimed at convincing others) for the occasions when we find ourselves talking to the unworried, or to law-enforcement officials, or to the public servants minding the legal framework that empowers the watchers.

The reason I’m writing this is to shoot holes in the “If you haven’t done anything wrong, don’t worry” story. Because it’s deeply broken and we need to refute it efficiently if we’re going to make any progress.

Privacy is a gift of civilization · Living in a civilized country means you don’t have to poop in a ditch, you don’t have to fetch water from the well a firewood from the forest, and you don’t have to share details of your personal life. It is a huge gift of civilization that behind your front door you need not care what people think about how you dress, how you sleep, or how you cook. And that when communicating with friends and colleagues and loved ones, you need not care what anyone thinks unless you’ve invited them to the conversation.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons, back in the day;
proper individual credit lost in the fog of time.

Privacy doesn’t need any more justification. It’s a quality-of-life thing and needs no further defense. We and generations of ancestors have worked hard to build a civilized society and one of the rewards is that often, we can relax and just be our private selves. So we should resist anyone who wants to take that away.

Bad people · The public servants and private surveillance-capitalists who are doing the watching are, at the end of the day, people. Mostly honorable and honest; but some proportion will always be crooked or insane or just bad people; no higher than in the general population, but never zero. I don’t think Canada, where I live, is worse than anywhere else, but we see a pretty steady flow of police brutality and corruption stories. And advertising is not a profession built around integrity. These are facts of life.

Given this, it’s unreasonable to give people the ability to spy on us without factoring in checks and balances to keep the rogues among them from wreaking havoc.

“But this stuff isn’t controversial” · You might think that your communications are definitely not suspicious or sketchy, and in fact boring, and so why should you want privacy or take any effort to have it?

Because you’re forgetting about the people who do need privacy. If only the “suspicious” stuff is made private, then our adversaries will assume that anything that’s private must be suspicious. That endangers our basic civilizational privacy privilege and isn’t a place we want to be.

Talking points for everyday use · First, it’s OK to say “I don’t want to be watched”; no justification is necessary. Second, as a matter of civic hygiene, we need to be regulating our watchers, watching out for individual rogues and corrupt cultures.

So it’s OK to demand privacy by default; to fight back against those who would commandeer the Internet; and (especially) to use politics to empower the watchers’ watchers; make their political regulators at least as frightened of the voters as of the enemy.

That’s the reasonable point of view. It’s the surveillance-culture people who want to abridge your privacy who are being unreasonable.