Privacy against the machine

Privacy against the machine

I have given up on privacy. I know the idea is sound – not everyone should know everything about everyone – but the society or “reality” that we are building, supporting, craving is incompatible with privacy. Denying a cookie here and there, or worrying about submitting private information to a large language model, is nothing but a rather transparent fig leaf.

The best we can hope for is to remain just a set of features and slip past public notice, but avoiding the notice of algorithms? That’s firmly reserved for the few isolated offline individuals, the Waldens (or Waldos?) of this world.

The Unconscious Surrender

We are not aware of the mountains and mountains of information we constantly share with the world: where we walk, what we search, what we order, what we pay for, whom we meet, what we like, post, write, and watch.

The privacy policies explain in theory what data is shared, but most people don’t realize what it means. And without a doubt, it has benefits – algorithms can personalize and adjust content. With the coming age of personal assistants, it will become even more comfortable the better your assistant knows your tastes and desires.

So many feel the GDPR is offering us protection, without ever realizing that they’re constantly consenting to data sharing with third parties, data traders in particular, on countless websites and services. It’s another transparent fig leaf we willingly don to cover our modesty.

The Machinery of Surveillance

Are you aware that your phone allows data traders to track everywhere you go? Whenever an ad is delivered, a ridiculous amount of auctions and activity happens in the background, broadcasting what is known about you – your location, your interests – to all the advertisers bidding for another set of eyeballs to deliver a personalized ad.

There are data traders who connect so many data points that they have surprisingly accurate profiles of your social status, your living situation, even your likely credit score. They’ve categorized you with thousands of features, all tied to a (hashed) email address. Your movement profile might give away who you are, if anyone cared to look. (Oh, that person is often near a brothel and the German parliament— wonder who that is. Fictional example, but you get the idea.)

Resistance is Futile

Now there are services like Incognito (I see lots of ads for them – Personalization doing its job!) that offer to purge your data from ad traders and other databases – but they cover such a small portion that it seems ridiculous to pay for such a service when your pseudonymous profile remains with thousands of other data traders. There’s just too much money to be made with data, and the convenience we get by using all these platforms, apps and services for little to no money is impossible to resist.

And even if you do resist – you are not isolated. People still have you in their contacts, exchange messages with you, tag you, mention you, leading to shadow profiles just waiting for you to succumb and enrich those profiles with your first-person data. Soon, the personal assistants of your friends will be reading the messages you send. (If they’re not already pasting them to ChatGPT to know what you are really saying.)

Acceptance

So, when it’s impossible to resist, to refrain – why bother with privacy anymore? I am accepting all the cookies. I Google health symptoms. I share my private thoughts with LLMs. I have my phone always with me, always with my location tracked. I blog. I pay digitally. I take the payback points. I have no decency anymore, just the comforts the algorithms provide in the form of mind-numbing entertainment.

The only thing I do for my privacy is use an adblocker, and I don’t even do that for privacy, but rather because the amount of advertising has become so penetrant I can’t deal with it anymore while surfing the web. And the spam filter, for all the newsletters that ignore my unsubscribes.

I feel bad about it, since I also work in the industry, but alas, it’s the small revenge for the loss of privacy I somehow agreed to without realizing.

Annoyance

I’ve moved on to another state, one where I’m now annoyed by people worrying about privacy – even though I know the thought is right. But we often use these worries to hinder the good we could achieve. We in Europe, particularly Germany, make it hard to use data for the benefit of society: (medical) research, fair tax collection, fair distribution of resources, (for example providing benefits without all the currently necessary bureaucracy) to name just a few. And yet it’s all data that data traders already have, in principle.

I’m currently diving into using large language models for therapeutic purposes, or rather to avoid the need for full-fledged therapy (for relationships). Privacy is then the first thing on everyone’s mind when I bring it up. As if Google, Facebook, TikTok would not already know if you have trouble in your relationship or a health problem. (Thanks, TikTok, for showing me how to deal with my bad posture! Even though I guess that’s the price of using TikTok.)

We are rejecting the good while accepting the bad; and we’re so far behind in digitalization of services, it’s maddening. We’ve made it easier for data to be used for our mind-numbing entertainment and thoughtless consumerism than for our actual benefit. And to me it seems like I have front-row seats in the privacy theater whenever I talk to others. Am I wrong? Am I missing something? What do you think? What’s in store for us?

(written in a Google Chrome webbrowser)


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