Your friend Kate answers the phone. You remind her you’re meeting at 10am tomorrow for breakfast. You tell her your fractured wrist is healing but the doctor said there’s still some way to go. Your mum’s illness … well, that’s a different matter.
Your hang-gliding, of course, is on hold, but you want to get back to it soon. And, sure, politics, and, sure, dating …
The information you’ve conveyed to Kate ranges from the medically-sensitive to the simply private, the important to the trivial – which is fine, because you’re friends.
Unfortunately, an unknown third party has recorded and documented everything you said, and will use it to continue building an in-depth personality profile of you.
None of this seems like reality but, in the least dramatic way possible, it is. Whenever you use the internet, you are volunteering to an anonymous third party, be it government or corporations, the sorts of information above, and more.
For some reason, we’re willing to sacrifice the confidentiality we’ve come to expect in the real world for an open-door policy online.
Internet giants such as Google and Facebook – as well as governments – store more knowledge about you than your parents do. They can, and do, use it to market to you; they might even hand it over to a judge seeking your name in relation to that document you downloaded, for research.
We need to expand our expectation of privacy into the digital world. We need to understand this as being fundamental to liberty – not the sign of a paranoid criminal. We live in a democracy and shouldn’t need to justify our desire for privacy. Our citizenship reasonably entitles it to us.
Above all, it’s critical we break free from the “common-sense” notion that “we’re nobody special”, that the threat of digital theft and espionage somehow doesn’t apply to us.
In the last ten years, systems for indiscriminate, mass surveillance – known as “mass interception systems” – have become the norm. Intelligence companies sell equipment to permanently record the phone calls of entire nations, or the location of every mobile phone in a city down to 50 metres.
Systems to infect the Facebook or smartphone users of an entire population group are already on the market, according to WikiLeaks: The Spy Files.
The British Government for example, wants to make use of “mass interception systems” to go through, on demand, the time-stamp of every text message and email message sent – as well as websites accessed and phone calls made, in real time.
But there’s hope. Tools are being developed by experts who care about liberty, some of which are already available for free. If you use them you might be labelled paranoid – not least by those who monitor your activity. They don’t want you to prevent them – as you’re legally entitled to do – from using your information. They don’t want you to use the tools below.
A survival guide
Use Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) – a program created in 1991 that allows encryption and authentication of email messages in order to protect the content from being read by unintended recipients. PGP also ensures you’re talking to who you think you are. It’s said to be the most widely used email encryption software in the world.
Install Truecrypt, open-source software designed to encrypt your computer hard drive or USB device in real-time so that nobody can get at your files. Your data is automatically encrypted before it is saved and decrypted right after it’s loaded, without the need for your intervention.
Make use of Off-the-Record (OTR) messaging. This cryptographic protocol allows you to have private conversations while instant messaging. An authentication process ensures your correspondent is who you think it is. Also, the messages you send don’t carry digital signatures that would be checkable by a third party.
Install Tor (which stands for “the onion router”), free software and an open network that helps enable online anonymity. As the blurb says, this is “free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis”.
Use the American search engine DuckDuckGo instead of Google. DuckDuckGo doesn’t track your online activity, doesn’t tailor search results explicitly to you, and takes steps considered to be beyond the industry standard to protect your privacy.
It seems wrong that we should have to hide, that privacy should have to be fought for in our everyday dealings and interactions, but that’s where we are, and where the tools outlined above can help.
Michael Shand
Michael Shand is a Friend of The Conversation.
Software Tester
Great Article, I never access my email from home but google seems to know when I'm online at home and provides links to things that I have veiwed elsewhere from different computers....its pretty scary
Donncha Redmond
Software Developer
Also, use browser extensions which stop Facebook/Google and others from tracking your every move around the web, e.g: Ghostery or Incognito for Safari.
Chris Booker
Research scientist
I installed Ghostery about 2 weeks ago, highly recommend it. It's quite scary to see just how many third parties are trying to track you. Also an extension 'Do Not Track Plus', which goes over and above the Do Not Track option available on the latest versions of Firefox, IE, etc.
Naty Guerrero-Diaz
Lawyer
The article assumes a universal desire, and in fact a need, for privacy without really explaining why we need it. In fact, it states that we shouldn't justify our need for privacy - we just need it for our freedom. What's more it tells us that we shouldn't question if we are being paranoid - of course we are not! Without more it makes me feel like we are being a little hysterical.
What woudl be really interesting is to read the author's view as to why we need to expand our expectation of privacy into the digital world. The reality is that a large amount of the general population does not value privacy as much as the author (if facebook privacy settings are anything to go by).
Is our traditional understanding of privacy really relevant today?
Ashley Hooper
Farm worker
Naty, we have little to gain and potentially a lot to lose from exposing the details of our private lives to anybody who's looking for it.
I think privacy is little understood by most Facebook users, and there's also the fact that "everybody else is doing it, I'm sure it can't hurt". In practice, it's already been seen that people have had job applications rejected on account of their social networking antics. Relevant? Between two matched candidates, that night you had at the stag do might be the clincher.
And furthermore, although it's difficult to imagine such a possibility in today's political climate, we really don't know what will be the future of the little bubble of liberal democracy a minority of the world's population are currently enjoying. I might take the analogy further and refer to International Business Machines' provision of advanced punch card systems to the Nazis to better facilitate the holocaust, but Godwin's law would of course apply.
Con Zymaris
Untethered Polymath
Naty,
in my experience, the more time that someone has had on-line, the more aware they are of the (mostly) negative repercussions of reduced privacy. In general, it's the newcomers who care little about privacy.
In most situations, it's better to listen to those who have had more experience than those with less.
-- Con
Ian Donald Lowe
Seeker of Truth
This comment seems a little incongruous, considering it is coming from a lawyer. If anyone should understand peoples' right to keep certain information about themselves private and how fundamental that is in a free society, I would have thought a student of the law would be near the top of the list.
As an individual I expect to be able to go about my buisness on a day to day basis without being under constant surveilance by the state or any other organisation, especially if I am not breaking any…
Read moreJohn Yasmineh
IT
Naty, that's a good point to make - certainly for much of human history, people may not have had much privacy while living in small groups, so it's possible that we can function without it. Maybe even function better without it.
I suppose the difference here is, that these companies are profiting via our private information, which introduces potential complications and abuses that are rather new to us all.
Kevin Cox
Kevin Cox is a Friend of The Conversation.
logged in via LinkedIn
The main reason privacy is important in the electronic world is that without it we cannot tell with whom we are communicating. In the online world if someone knows all about us they can become us. We need to be able to keep our secrets (like passwords, like our Tax File Numbers, like our credit card numbers) to ourselves and the organisations with whom we deal. We need to know whenever someone else pretends to be us.
Another reason is that if we do not know what others are saying about us then…
Read moreJohn Yasmineh
IT
Yep, nice article. One problem that is difficult to mitigate is that use of much of the listed software is illegal in some countries. So just using it can get you into trouble.
I think we won't be really free to be private on the Internet until some large organisation like Google or Facebook grossly misuses people's data and destroys some lives. Then people will remember the value of privacy and some laws may be made against this sort of thing.
And that probably won't happen for some time. Google/Facebook/et al may be dictatorships, but they are first generation dictatorships run by freedom-loving entrepreneurs, so that might be enough to keep a leash on privacy abuse. Once Ceasar Augustus is gone though, he will be replaced by Tiberius... and eventually Nero.
Stephen Prowse
CEO at Wound CRC
Most people value their privacy less than they value sharing information, especially people in their teens and twenties. With a few exceptions, why would people be concerned about the websites they have visited? Freedom and privacy are two different issues. People have the right to privacy and those who want to exercise that right need awareness and need to use the tools available. If people feel the need for privacy, do not use the internet or take more care. This article helps increase awareness.
Wally Week
Bicycle Engineer
For Web browsing, I would recommend adding some plugins such as Ghostery (http://www.ghostery.com) Better Privacy (http://nc.ddns.us/BetterPrivacy/BetterPrivacy.htm) and HTTPS Everywhere (https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere).
Using https instead of http as much as possible is key to fight Web traffic tracking by ISPs.
By the way, this same Web site supports https, which is nice.
Nicholas Sheppard
Computer Scientist & Teacher
I think the problems solved by software like PGP and Tor are relatively minor ones, at least at present. To use the analogy at the beginning of the article, the more significant risk is not so much that some evil-doer may eavesdrop on my phone call to Kate, but that Kate will blab to Jim and Sally and Bill etc. This is how Facebook makes most of its faux pas, I think.
As Stephen Prowse suggests, people value sharing information. We have plenty of good reasons to post information about ourselves on social networking sites, hand over our addresses and credit card numbers to on-line shops, and tell our physicians about our health. But encrypted communications don't help if those shops and doctors on-sell their address lists to marketers, or social networkers use our posts to stalk us.
I don't want to disappear on-line any more than I want to be ignored by everyone off-line. The deeper question is: how do I control the sharing and use of information about me?
Con Zymaris
Untethered Polymath
Pertinent to our discussion here:
http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/04/02/americas-new-data-centre-makes-uk-surveillance-plans-seem-petty/
Quote:
In the small town of Bluffdale in the Utah desert, the US government is halfway to completing a gargantuan complex designed to store and trawl through billions of phone calls, emails, and other global communications. As the UK government reveals its own plans to carry out mass surveillance, a lengthy piece in May’s Wired reveals the full extent of the US’s ambitions to capture and spy on almost everything that is said online or on the phone.
The Utah Data Center is the new hub in the National Security Agency’s (NSA) network of surveillance centres: a sprawling $2bn complex that takes the US one step closer to ‘total information awareness’.
Sean Lamb
Science Denier
There is a difference between tracked by an algorithm and being tracked by people - which is probably why most people don't worry about privacy that much.
Having said that I installed Ghostery and it detect the following third party elements in my browser:
364 advertising elements
206 analytical elements
15 privacy elements
178 tracking elements
75 widget elements
I am not sure what they do or what it means, but it certainly sounds impressive.
Daniel Meyerowitz-Katz
Policy Analyst
Of course we all want privacy, but there is something important that seems to be overlooked.
The reality is that we are all making a trade-off at the moment with our internet use. Advertising dollars are what make organisations like Facebook, Google and Twitter profitable companies -- the entire web as we know it subsists on targeted adds. Without the data that these organisations collect on you, they would no longer be able to offer advertisers the ability to advertise to specific identified…
Read morezeitgeist
logged in via Twitter
Where do we begin with privacy...
There are a significant amount of technologies you can use for privacy.
The ones listed above as well as I2P, VPN, online anonymisers - although in some cases that data can be made available to the feds (http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/privacy/231602248) and free anonymity linux distributions such as Tails (https://tails.boum.org/)
If you seek to keep yourself private from advertising companies such as Google Adsense, then NoScript, Ghostery…
Read moreSean Lamb
Science Denier
Yes, although in my case I am all in favour of the NSA or the US Government tracking me around the web - they might finally realise what vicious, violent, hypocritical thugs they are.
I could offer my online interactions as a service....