Author’s Note
As a journalist I’m lucky enough to be able to spend time with some very well-informed and interesting people. I recently had lunch with a group of senior technology leaders from various well-known brands across several industries, and soon enough the conversation turned to privacy.
The prevailing view in the group seemed to be one of irritation at what some of them clearly saw as a meddlesome community of privacy advocates, who, in their opinion, were always on the lookout for things to be offended by. ‘So what if someone takes your data, no one really cares,’ was one comment, with which some in the group seemed to agree.
This is concerning, and is one of the reasons I decided to write this book. I can see the perspective of some of those technologists and business people. On the face of it, there is little harm in our data being harvested, even without our knowledge or consent. No one dies or gets ill. You don’t come out in an ugly rash when Facebook logs every action you’ve ever taken on its site. Your hair doesn’t fall out, nor suddenly sprout from unseemly places when Google scans your emails looking for advertising and profiling opportunities.
But what is worrying is the rate and extent of the many erosions of our privacy in the digital age. This rapid wearing down of one of our fundamental human rights might not seem important now, but it does affect lives, and those effects are growing year on year. It influences your credit rating, insurance premiums, medical options, and it feeds a clandestine corporate bonanza seeking to surreptitiously change your behaviour for its own advantage, not yours. And it’s not just private organizations, but governments if anything have their hands even deeper in the data trough.
At the same time much of the existing internet economy revolves around the basic human desire to get something for (at least seemingly) nothing. Web search, and many types of internet services and apps are free to use, and the firms behind them need to recoup their investment somehow. This book doesn’t argue that firms like Google and Facebook should shut down, nor completely change their business models, but rather that most of their revenue generating activities could be altered to better respect their users’ privacy with little loss of income.
This book aims to present a balanced view of the arguments for and against the current state of digital privacy, and to show the direction of travel. The reader is invited to decide for his or herself how they feel about where we’re going to end up if we stay on this course.
If nothing else, I hope the reader emerges having read this book able to debate the views of some of the technologists I had lunch with that day. Privacy does matter.