For anyone who is really concerned about keeping their thoughts private there is only one piece of reliable technology: write with a pen on paper, and burn what you’ve written when you’re done. For the rest of us, who want to get things done, there is an inevitable trade-off which we still don’t entirely understand. We now carry with us everywhere devices that give us access to all the world’s information, but they can also offer almost all the world vast quantities of information about us. The sense of personal integrity and boundaries that seems self-evident is actually the product of particular social arrangements which are profoundly affected by technology even though it doesn’t determine them. Technological change could move us towards our better selves or our worse ones, but things can’t stay as they are.
To go online is to descend into a world as transparent as an aquarium – and this aquarium is full of sharks.
It would be a mistake to see these problems as primarily technological because that would suggest that their solutions would be technological, too. In fact, the preservation of personal privacy and collective security online is a political and social task as much as it is one for the very few experts who understand the ramifications of mathematical magics like public key cryptography. Technological solutions will only work within a legal and political context, and the real threats to privacy come not from vulnerable widgets but weak laws, careless users and feeble oversight. The WhatsApp encryption scheme is proof against anyone who does not control or threaten the company’s own networks, which is something only a government could do. But sufficiently ruthless governments would not hesitate to do so if they had the opportunity. And against sufficient ruthlessness and physical power, technology is ultimately no defence. Although we can use schemes of encryption that are mathematically impossible to crack, so long as the password is known to anyone it can be tricked or even tortured from its holder.
Adding to this problem is the increasingly permeable border between state and non-state actors. When the FBI could not crack the iPhone used in the San Bernadino shootings, it turned to a private firm in Israel, which could. But that company has in turn now been hacked, and meanwhile many of the devices designed for use by law enforcement, which can suck all the information out of a captured mobile phone, can now be bought freely over the internet by any private company – or mafia outfit.
These threats can seem very distant. It’s easy to suppose that you will never come to the attention of a hostile state apparatus. On the other hand, the commercially motivated attacks on privacy pervade the whole of the internet, and in fact fund most of it today. Websites routinely collect as much information as they can about the users and then sell it on to data brokers for use in personally targeted advertising campaigns. Facebook (which, incidentally, owns WhatsApp) has built its entire titanic empire on this trade. Even when this data is anonymised, the protection is leaky, and in any case, someone who knows everything about you except your name is in a much stronger position than one who knows your name but nothing else.
But the real danger comes when these two kinds of loss of privacy combine so that the knowledge gained for commercial ends is used for political manipulation too. It is in the interests of advertisers to short-circuit rational thought and careful consideration, but it is even more in the interests of demagogues to do so. Against this we must rely on moral and intellectual defences much more than the supposed magic of advanced technology.
• This article was amended on 28 June 2017 to remove a reference to a news article which had been reviewed and amended.
