Privacy (or not) is a Systems Property

This post is a response to comments from Nicholas Thompson .

At heart, I'm a systems person. I think most human behavior is driven by the incentives we (mostly accidentally) bake into the rhythms of daily life. That's also why I think good civics is mostly about making it easier to do constructive things, and harder to do destructive things.

For a long time, the right to privacy was functionally a negative right. That is, it was a right we protected by NOT doing something: you'd have to do extra work (a physical search, for instance) to violate someone's privacy. It was easier, everything else being equal, to do the constructive thing and leave people alone.

The global internet combined with highly centralized digital consumer services has fundamentally altered this dynamic. It is increasingly easy to reach into just about anyone's life and extract troves of highly sensitive, personal data.

Equally as startling, this new ease has led us to question why we'd really care about privacy in the first place; "if I didn't do anything wrong, what do I have to hide?"

The right to privacy is, at its most practical, really about freedom from arbitrary imprisonment or reappropriation. We, all of us, do or say things every day that could be used by a malicious actor to frame us in a negative light.

And a good prosecutor doesn't get paid to "discover the truth". They get paid to win (increasingly by any means) a subjective, oratorial game defined by an arcane set of rules that culminates in depriving another human being of freedom, property, and/or good reputation.

The wisdom that recognizes the value of privacy is the same wisdom that recognizes the value of assuming innocence; the alternative is to give those in power unlimited scope to direct government violence at whomever they choose.

If we embrace this wisdom, it should be clear that the existing privacy-obliterating relationship between the state and digital service providers is highly dangerous. So how do we fix it?

By making it easier to do constructive things, and harder to do destructive things.

I think this is where, as a nerd, I'm supposed to say, "strong, user-controlled cryptography needs to be ubiquitous!" ...so, that is definitely true... but it is also a tactical, not a strategic, solution.

So long as consumers really only have a handful of viable pathways to access the digital world - and those pathways are built on top of centralized providers employing surveillance capitalism business models - law enforcement will continue to have an irresistible incentive to abuse the power of those gatekeepers.

I believe the strategic solution is to advance alternative systems and business models - ones that incentivize open, decentralized, user-owned, and user-controlled digital services.