“It’s not about something to hide, it’s about something to lose”. This quote by Edward Snowden sums up this book by Carissa Véliz, first released in 2020. Here, I will present some topics of the book for the interested. I should emphasize that this review concerns the 2020 edition.
Carissa is an associate professor at the University of Oxford and has led an extensive research project on privacy, Data, privacy & the individual.
Introduction of everyday life
She takes us on a tour through everyday life with an array of technological devices and the related privacy issues: electronic door bells, cameras of various kinds and genetic tests. It’s nice to read something that’s actually relatable, in a setting of everyday life, starting in the morning and ending the same day. At times, though, it’s a bit far fetched. All those devices and the lack of privacy is there to depict a bleak and likely future more than life today, because very few people encounter all of those devices every single day. We meet them all in one day as one person.
Collective aspect of privacy
By far, my favorite part of the entire book, and probably the most important one too. We’re not isolated people, but interconnected and interdependent. On my phone, there’s personal data on people I call, text, send mails and photograph. In the photos is location data and biometric data on people. In my calendar I reveal information on people I meet: when, where, why and how.
Perhaps my neighbor’s phone contains photos of me, processed by apps I didn’t even knew existed, now fed some of my biometric data. What are the apps, who owns those apps, which personal data do they share and disseminate and with which third parties? Where is my personal data actually stored and what actual purpose is behind the collection in the first place?
Our urge to willingly share information about ourselves to people we know is a gate into sharing information with an unknown amount of people. How many people read the privacy policy of a new app or service?
Privacy is power
Thus, one conclusion is that privacy is about power, because personal data is power. Collection of personal data is power, so abstaining or avoiding to be “harvested” is a key to keep autonomy and the privacy of individuals (somewhat) intact.
Companies, which is most often the case in the Western countries, collects lots of personal data on lots of people. Virtually no one can avoid or escape this massive collection. Holding personal data means power, because people can be “nudged” into doing things they aren’t even aware. Tristan Harris’ famous article on “How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind” is a telling example, the Cambridge Analytica scandal another.
Carissa shares a story of how someone she knows works as a programmer and assigned the task of surveilling one single person for a period of time. His job is to follow and study this person, in order to understand what computer systems can do and the amount of personal data one is able to collect. It’s not been long since it was revealed how tech giants assigned staff to actually listen to people’s conversations through voice assistants.
What happens if a state turns authoritarian, as happens in Poland and Hungary, from within the European Union itself? What happens when the state also uses the personal data companies have collected? Carissa tells us a moving story from World War II, which I will write about separately.
The inevitable technological progress
A very common trope of the debate in many countries is that technological progress is more or less absolute, inevitable. No matter what we say or do, technological progress cannot be stopped. It has become a religion of sorts, a belief rather than fact. Carissa names Google Glass as an example of hampered technological progress. After the reinvention of the smartphone and the smartwatch, the glasses would become the next inevitable device for the masses. After heavy criticism, much concerned with privacy, and outright bans, Google Glass project was officially abandoned.
Read it
These are some of the topics Carissa covers in her book and I have briefly reviewed parts of the content. There’s plenty of more and all I can do is urge you to read it.
If you would like a good introduction on privacy, I recommend the episode Privacy by the podcast Constitutional. It’s set in the American context, but is a very good story of how privacy became a more complicated issue in the United States one hundred years ago and the importance of one man, Louis Brandeis.