Nine steps you can take to protect yourself online

Image credit: Gaelle Marcel

The internet has shaken up so many parts of our lives, from media and manufacturing, to mattresses, make-up and making out. It’s weaponised our narratives, created heroes and villains, brought us closer together and in some cases, driven us further apart. It’s also created a lot of collateral damage, especially when it comes to privacy.

Over the last decade, we’ve watched a major battle play out. On the one side, privacy activists, who view freedom from surveillance as an inalienable right essential to the healthy functioning of modern society. On the other side, those who insist that for our own good, governments and corporations should be allowed to track and monitor our most private information.

That battle has been won by the companies and the surveillance state. The Snowdens and Mannings and Winners and thousands of unsung heroes put up a great fight, but in the end Goliath prevailed. Our secrets used to be our own. Now they’re owned by the platforms and databases where we store them, and those are easy to penetrate. If telecom firms have it  – and they do  —  the government now has the ability to get it. As Alan Davidson, the former chief lobbyist for Google once put it:

If you keep it, they will come.

Most of us have been willing collaborators in this privacy invasion. We confess our mental health problems on Facebook, tell advertisers how many kids we have, and happily allow weather and traffic apps to know where we are at all times. That’s not totally unreasonable. Sure, we’ve given tech companies unlimited access to our data, allowing them to sell those insights and earn money from adverts, but in return we’ve received wonderful services such as email, intercontinental video calls, social media and better weather predictions. We gave up our privacy, but we also allowed law enforcement officials to solve more crimes and disrupt terrorism, exposed more political corruption, fueled social movements and helped topple totalitarian regimes.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch right?

As Henry Drummond says in Inherit the Wind (1960), the classic courtroom drama about the Scopes Monkey Trial:

Progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there’s a man who sits behind a counter and says, ‘Alright, you can have a telephone, but you lose privacy and the charm of distance… Mister, you may conquer the air, but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline.’

So is privacy the price we need to pay for progress?

Not so fast. We don’t have to accept its loss. We can still actively protect it.

The language of political philosophers and international lawyers can be useful here. They talk about two kinds of freedoms. The first are positive freedoms  —  the freedom to perform an action, to access a resource, to control and direct one’s own life. For conservatives these include things like the right to bear arms and the right to assemble and speak freely; for progressives they include the right to safe reproductive care, the right of sanctuary for refugees, equal pay and the right to unionise. The second are negative freedoms  —  freedom from external interference that causes you harm. These include the right to live free from socioeconomic insecurity, or from the threat of environmental disaster, or the hazard of preventable injury and disease.

Most of the interesting stuff in politics happens when either one or both kinds of freedoms are lacking, or are at odds with each other. There’s a great moment in The Handmaid’s Tale for example, where Aunt Lydia says to Offred, “There is more than one kind of freedom. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.” Over the course of the novel, the truth is revealed to be the exact opposite. It turns out there’s no point in having freedom from harm if you don’t have the freedom to make your own choices.

Right now we still have the freedom to make our own choices when it comes to our digital lives. However, that kind of freedom, the freedom to actively protect our privacy, comes at a cost. If we want access to digital tools that allow us to remain incognito, then we have to understand that the same tools can be used by criminals, terrorists, and shady politicians. If we think that diversity and freedom are valuable parts of human existence in a global, hyper digital, 21st century society, then we have to give up a little bit of security.

This is where the next big privacy battle is going to be fought  —  over the right to use digital tools and services that hide us from prying eyes and obnoxious advertising, without fear of prosecution. We shouldn’t have to give up our data unless we choose to. And if we do decide to give it up, it should be an active choice that we make, in the full knowledge that for minorities fighting persecution at home and abroad, for activists on the frontlines of environmental and social battles, and for democracy campaigners in authoritarian regimes, the right to privacy isn’t a choice. It’s life and death.

If you think this is a fight worth having, then get serious about your privacy right now. Take control of your digital hygiene, in the same way that you would take control over your health, or your savings, or your right to vote.