Privacy is a major concern for most folks that are technologically minded and for a good reason. Data from aggregate data harvesting is used for everything from targeted political advertising and social psyops to shaping consumer behaviour, and it is as rampant as ever and only increasing, despite its ill effects on the individual, environment and societies at large, because of moral bankruptcy and economic incentives.
Privacy is good, except when it isn’t. The main goal of privacy on the internet, for me atleast, is to primarily protect oneself from psyops and maintain psychological and moral well-being by shielding oneself from services seeking to inculcate compulsive behaviours in their users for their own gain; and secondarily to advocate for communication infrastructures and global networks that protect people who are more specifically targeted by governments, like activists, journalists and dissidents or people who live under more transparently oppressive regimes than those in the West, and should have the right to access information which is prohibited by their government.
That is all well and good, but the quest for privacy often leads to paranoia and greater distress than if one were not to care about privacy at all. There is a risk in becoming a wholly private person.
We all have a psychological desire for privacy and to draw boundaries, and it is important that we have the technological means and legislation that enables us to do this and control our information in the information age; to protect ourselves from harm to and to keep powerful actors from manipulating policy and public opinion to their advantage at the expense of the masses. But our goal shouldn’t be to withdraw into complete privacy and box ourselves in by drawing a circle around ourselves and never letting anything past that boundary. The freedom and power to do so does not mean we all should retreat into total anonymity. The freedom to withold information does not mean you should not share anything. Doing so you might be rightfully depriving bad actors access to data they shouldn’t have, but also depriving yourself of the chance of being part of the public. “But I don’t care about the public.” Neither do I really, but that is a consequence of being private, and if I don’t care about the public why would the public care about me? It is in my best interest to protect my privacy on one hand but on the other not to. If privacy is a virtue then where lies the mean?
“I don’t care about privacy because I have nothing to hide.” Words heard by everyone who is even remotely aware of the discussion surrounding online privacy. Words that probably make your eyes roll, and mine too. The reasons outlined at the beginning should be reason enough for anyone to want privacy even if they don’t have anything to hide.
But the people indifferent to privacy who say that do have a point. A private man is a man who does have something to hide. A private man does not confess his guilt, does not come out in the open to be judged by the group, does not submit before their verdict of justice, pardon or punishment. He lives in hiding with his guilt and guilty we all are.
Confession is an act of declaring one’s identity. I am guilty of this, I did that–I am this kind of a person. I am in love with you–I am this kind of a person. I hold these beliefs, I stand behind this creed–I am this kind of a person. This kind of confession done in earnest is an attempt to relate to other people in a new way, as a new person, to create something new by way of revealing to others what was kept private hitherto, because keeping that internal conflict or part of your experience that forms a key element of your identity hidden leads to–what? Nothing. Stagnation.
When done in bad faith confession is a way of temporarily resolving tension without actually tackling it head-on, because that would be uncomfortable. Toying with the idea in the open but hiding behind irony, because it would be too socially damning to be sincere, or because it benefits the confessor to put on a charade. It would be a grave mistake not to confess in earnest as pushing through that uncomfortableness leads to mental growth.
The pangs of conscience forcing the guilty man to confess or to hide his guilt is a good thing. A shameless man is a dangerous man. Having a conscience is a sign that the rules and norms of the group and the consequences for breaking or deviating from them have been properly internalised by the offender and having a conscience means that he should be able to self-regulate his behaviour for the good of the group and himself. What need does such a man have for confession if he is able to self-regulate? He errs, for one, and he might become conceited, acting as the judge, jury and executioner for himself, thinking that he is above other members of the group and licensed to act in whichever way according to his whims; and keeping those whims private only makes him wretched over time, whether he realises it or not, because even if his conscience is okay with his behaviour, he knows he is a deviant outcast, an outsider from the group, and we all have a need to belong to a group. It is not beneficial to place oneself into an adversarial position to one’s fellow man for the sake of it: the cynical man who bites the common hand will not be able to bark for much longer. Nor is it good for our well-being to cut ourselves off from the herd–and I use the word herd here deliberately as I know it’s going to rouse a knee-jerk reaction from certain people who are enamored by their individual superiority over the masses. I am not advocating mindless conformity. I am acknowledging a common bond.
On the other hand if the group’s values are corrupt or misplaced, and the man of good morals who feels outcast from the group will not speak up, will not confess, no positive change will ever be initiated. What good are his morals if they do not benefit others? In his privacy he becomes anti-social and morally weak. Maybe he needs to first speak out anonymously, and as stated earlier the ability to do so is desirable and good, but if he does so, he is not, or will appear not to be, standing behind his beliefs in steadfastness. Anonymity lessens accountability and that goes both ways. Perhaps the circumstances require privacy, but if they do not, then we should not hide behind a veil of anonymity and rather be someone in the open with an individual face and voice. Hiding should not be a requirement. He says, writing this under a pseudonym.
I am aware that I am somewhat conflating the terms privacy and anonymity here, but that is on purpose. It may sound neat to make a clear distinction between the two: when you disclose who you are but hide what you do, that is privacy; when you disclose what you do but hide who you are, that is anonymity. I think that is an over simplification that is useful only when talking about these things from a purely technical point of view, but in most other cases it is unhelpful. What you do is who you are and who you are determines what you do. Privacy and anonymity are interconnected, inseparable and hard to discriminate from each other at times.
I have mentioned groups many times now. A community of people. But online spaces can hardly be considered a true community. Most obviously people in online communities are not necessarily geographically near each other, and if the participants are bent on privacy it may be impossible to even tell where they’re from. But cyberspace collapses the distance, right? Yes, but it also means it takes literally no steps to walk out and never to return–for better or worse you’re not bound by any physical considerations which is one of the key factors that holds communities together. It is hard to connect to members of online communities in the same way as real communities as they may not be facing the same problems and improvements in their social or economic circumstances will most likely have no effect on the rest of the “community”. Members of communities are not dependent on each other in any meaningful way other than through the medium of their connection, and in the case of online communities that is limited to information technology. Sure, individual connections may be formed through these online communities that are or may become meaningful in other ways, but that is a separate phenomenon.
Remaining private and floating as an anonymous ghost in these ephemeral non-communities is accelerating the atomisation and social alienation that only benefits the malicious actors the privacy crackpots are so keen to fight against or flee from. They are playing into their hands and in the process they are depriving themselves of becoming an actual person relating to other actual persons, even though it is mediated through cyberspace. Someone real, someone of consequence that can connect with other real people and not just anonymous non-people; and inversely they are also depriving other real people of the opportunity of connecting with them. Everybody loses and humanity becomes poorer. The web is not conducive to civil discourse or serious debate, but since we will continue to interact on the web anonymity is not the panacea that solves those problems, nor does it produce individuals with views informed by social relations, creative new ideas, and a will to see those views put into action–they will languish in their impotent privacy.
As of writing this post I have chosen not to disclose my given name, approximate location or physical appearance as the person running this website. I write here freely about my life and mention experiences and places that could provide clues to my identification, but nevertheless I do so under a pseudonym. It is a false I whose back is constantly turned to the reader as I confess–but to whom am I confessing? Not to the people reading this certainly. There is nobody in the copper wires. Whether this text is transmitted or not does not matter, it does not matter if there is anybody behind my turned back watching me as I confess–but to whom am I confessing? I am a private man, a conceited man, a man who thinks he can rid himself of guilt by confessing–to himself? The I behind the pseudonym? I am attaching these confessions to a pseudonym for now, and perhaps that is better than not attaching them to anything, but will I take them with me when I am finished?
>> Home