# Digital privacy is important, even though you think it doesn't impact you
The average person (or business entity) publicly shares their personal
information on the internet. If you search with Google, send email
with Gmail, talk with Facebook Messenger, and browse the Web with
Chrome, you are being tracked. These free services, and many more,
store and analyse your personal messages, search history, cloud
photos, and the websites you visit. This information is readily
available to governments, hackers, or really any business or person
who is interested and willing to pay (law firms, journalists,
advertisers, etc).
This is not news to most people. You have perhaps experienced an
advertisement pop up suddenly related to a website you visited that
you thought was private. You have probably had Facebook recommend new
friends who you just met a week ago. However, these are all rather
benign examples that don't warrant paranoia over your digital
security.
Let's start with a
[TED Talk on Why Privacy Matters](
https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters).
Take 20 minutes to watch it and come back.
For those too lazy to click, Glenn Greenwald makes the point that we
don't behave the same way in the physical world and the virtual world.
In the physical world, we lock our houses, cover our PIN at the ATM,
close the curtains, don't talk about business secrets in public, and
use an empty room when having a private conversation. This is largely
because we understand that in the physical world, we can open unlocked
doors, glance at PIN keypads, peek through curtains, listen to company
gossip, and overhear conversations.
In the virtual world, we are unfortunately uneducated about how to
snoop on other's private information. We assume that sending an email
on Gmail is private, or opening an incognito mode browser hides
everything. This is far from the truth: mass surveillance is
relatively cheap and easy, and there are many organisations that are
well invested in knowing how to snoop. However, for the most of us, we
only experience this through tailored advertising. As a result, there
is little motivation to care about privacy.
In this post, I will not talk about how you are tracked, or how to
secure yourself. These are deep topics that deserve more discussion by
themselves. However, I do want to talk about why privacy matters.
The right to privacy is a basic human right. Outside the obvious
desire to hide company secrets, financial and medical information, we
behave differently when we are being watched. You can watch adult
videos if you close the door, buy different things if you don't have a
judgmental cashier, and talk about different things on the phone if
you aren't sitting on a train in public.
Again, these are benign and socially accepted norms. However, there
are people living in countries where the norm is largely biased
against their favour. Global issues like corruption and political
oppression exist, even though many of us are lucky to turn a blind
eye. Victims of these countries are censored, incarcerated, and
killed. See for yourself where your country ranks in the
[list of freedom indices](
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices).
In these societies, a greater percentage of the population start to be
impacted by the poor digital security that we practice. We can see
this in the following graph, which shows the usage of
[The Tor Project](
https://www.torproject.org/), a tool that anonymises
Internet traffic, correlating with political oppression
([read the original study](
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1461444816639976?papetoc=)).
Further investigation shows that Tor usage (see
[how Tor statistics are derived](
https://gitweb.torproject.org/metrics-web.git/tree/src/main/resources/doc/users-q-and-a.txt))
similarly correlates to politically sensitive events. As of writing
this post, I rewinded the clock to the three most recent political
events that occurred in countries which experience censorship and
political oppression.
First, we have the
[19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China](
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th_National_Congress_of_the_Communist_Party_of_China).
You can see the tripling in activity as this event occurred. The red
dots show potential censorship.
Similarly, we can see a turbulent doubling in value during the
[blocks of social media and TV channels in Pakistan](
https://dailytimes.com.pk/147132/social-media-goes-down-in-pakistan/).
Finally, a spike of usage and statistically relevant censorship /
release of censorship events during the
[anti-government protests in Iran](
https://ooni.torproject.org/post/2018-iran-protests/).
These three events were simply picked as the most three recent
political events. They demonstrate a strong change in behaviour when
people believe that digital privacy has an impact on their actions.
It's not just Tor. For example, a couple weeks ago,
[30,000 Turks were incorrectly accused of treason from a 1x1 tracking pixel](
https://boingboing.net/2018/01/28/30000-accused.html).
This results in jobs, houses, and innocent lives being lost. In the
US, Governors are still signing in support of Net Neutrality.
Despite these issues, there are those that believe that as long as we
do not do anything bad, there is nothing to hide. Privacy tools are
used by criminals, not the common population. This is also untrue. The
definition of "bad" changes depending on who is in power, and
criminals are motivated individuals who have much better privacy tools
than most will ever have. Statistically, increasing the *basic*
awareness of privacy does not increase criminal activity, but does
increase protection of the unfairly oppressed.
Those who are fortunate enough to live a complacent digital life tend
to decrease the average awareness of digital privacy. Just as we
donate relief aid to countries that experience wars or natural
disasters, we should promote awareness about digital freedom on the
behalf of those who do not have it. Nurturing a more privacy aware
generation -a generation who is born with a tablet in their hands- is
a responsibility to ensure that social justice and the expression of
the marginalised population remains possible.
