Maanal Gauri, Abhigyan Mehrotra, Prachi Parakh, Vaishnavi Rathi, Tanya Sravan
Plaksha University
Mark Zuckerburg bought an island to protect his privacy. What are you doing to protect yours?
As we all know, Google baba knows everything. Everything about you. Do you know why? It’s ‘cause you’re always on that phone—the phone that your mom warned you about. The internet is built to release as much of your information to as many people as possible, and you literally cannot do anything about it. We live in an era of big data where our ‘digital exhaust’ leaves a trail in its wake, revealing everything about our lives. As technology has increased access to information, it has also revealed flaws in the conception of privacy. Not much thought has gone into protecting you from the information that you yourself put out there. Forget protecting your privacy, there isn’t even a common definition, meaning, or description of what privacy is in any sphere of life. Before we try to solve this issue we must explore the origins and implications of privacy as a concept.
“Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind,” claimed the young maiden in John Milton’s masque from 1634. While this may have been true back then, it is no longer 1634, and we now have things like brain chips and the internet, so now thou canst touch the freedom of her mind—our minds.
It is clear that technology has outgrown our intuition of privacy. From an evolutionary perspective, we humans associate privacy with possession. As the digital world challenges our ownership psychology, we are often left not knowing what’s ours, and whether we ought to protect it. Stripped of the social cues that tend to ring our emotional alarm bells, the dangers of the online environment elicit a muted response. For instance, when someone’s staring at you, you feel uneasy—however we never really notice how closely we’re being monitored online. It’s not that people are unaware of these dangers; they believe the risks only apply to other people. So you know that phishing scam that Sharma ji got stuck in? Well, you may be next. And if you expect the law to help you, sorry, but you’re out of luck.
While respect for a person's privacy is a prima facie social duty, it does not come without its exceptions. For example, the police may infringe on a criminal's privacy by spying on or seizing personal documents. Equally, a government has the right to collect private and personal information from its citizens in order to ‘maintain’ society's order and peace. Even though social responsibility brings limits to individual liberty and the right to privacy, this infringement of privacy is deemed necessary to ultimately protect societal privacy.
In a sense, one canstate that privacy is a fundamental right. This is because a person's privacy is linked to a person's right to freedom and their identity as autonomous human beings. Thus, our need for privacy is inextricably linked to a feeling of personal individuality and a rejection of conformity. Therefore, the conversation shifts to the Constitution and how other rights are used to ensure privacy. However, it is impossible to reduce privacy to its simplest form and hence it remains ambiguous as a fundamental right. All definitions of it either become too general to be of any use or too narrow to allow its complete encapsulation. Basically, the Law will not be helping Sharma Ji any time soon. However, with the ‘digital revolution’, the concept of privacy has embarked on a new journey beyond the legal domain that will most likely lead privacy back to its origins—its relation to philosophy.
Once upon a time, a few mistakes ago, your home was thought of as your castle, a haven of perfect solitude where you could unquestionably avoid prying eyes. No one ventured inside one's home without permission, with the exception of the postman (and maybe your nosey neighbouring aunty). This concept is not unique to the digital age. The division between oikos, the private family life, and polis, the public life—as defined by Aristotle—has historical roots in philosophical discourse. Contrary to what their (explicit) sculptures suggest, the ancient Greeks actually did care about their privacy.
With the passage of time and the advancement of technology, the notion of privacy too has evolved, unfortunately to its detriment. Hence, a philosophical examination of these changing tides in the sea of privacy will ensure that as technology grows, it serves humanity rather than the other way around.
As we have all witnessed, with these technological advancements, our privacy has been increasingly compromised. To go to the root of this problem, we need to understand our relationship with technology. Our relationship with technology is one of dependence—we need technology to perform activities that are fundamental to our existence. This dependence has deepened to such an extent that it is causing us to lose sight of ourselves as beings capable of standing on our own within this world.
The activities that we used to perform on our own, we now perform with the help of technology. When these activities were performed without technology, they had certain deep human connotations, which are now lost with the use of technology. Privacy is one of the casualties of technology. For example, with the advent of social media, the information that we used to keep private is now out for the world to see. This has had an adverse effect on the sanctity of human relationships, as everyone is reduced to the status of a Facebook ‘friend’. Private conversations based on trust are the foundation of friendships. But now with the loss of privacy, we have lost the art of learning how to trust.
By surrendering certain duties to technology in exchange for convenience, and the increased freedom that comes with it, we are giving away part of our identity, and therefore, reducing the boundaries of our privacy. Our choices, by extension, are free but perhaps not fully autonomous. Technology has an effect on our functionality and irrevocably changes us.
So…now what?
What we’ve just tried to reveal is the crisis surrounding privacy. Do we know how to solve it? Unfortunately, no. India is still struggling to release a proper privacy protection bill; we haven’t even figured out where the line lies between what is shared and what needs to be shared.
It is high time we stopped being ignorant about issues around privacy and understood the extreme ways it has been impacting us as a society. Even on an individual level, it affects us as we perform the most mundane of activities. So, the next time you hop onto Amazon to indulge in retail therapy, remember that Uncle Jeff is watching your every move.
