It is very difficult to put a definitive status on privacy in today’s digital age. I am not sure if privacy is completely dead or if it will die in a certain period of time. But one thing I am quite confident in is that privacy is dying and it is dying fast. The diminishing privacy is not a consequence of a single phenomenon. It is in fact, caused by the combination of a variety of things. Ever increasing volume of data being generated, computer algorithms becoming abundantly sophisticated and humans growing in eagerness to share every aspect of their lives with the world; these to me are the primary factors that are proving to be fatal to the concept of privacy as we know it.
The very first thing we need to consider is the near unfathomable size of data being produced by a single human on average. As per the statistic given in the key note speech at 2017 CeBIT Global Conference by Dr. Michal Kosinski, a single human produced 500 MB of data per day. This statistic is over two years old and therefore this number must have increased by factors already. Not all of this data is produced intentionally by humans. In fact, most of it is gathered silently by companies governing the Internet. “If you are not paying for a service, you are the product.” This quote sums up the situation perfectly. If companies on the Internet are incentivizing the end of human privacy then us humans are sponsoring it by giving away the perfect resource to extract out every little detail there is to extract from our lives. For me, the problem is not that data is being collected in various manners from our digital footprint, but it is the fact that we are so careless in our choices when it comes to data and so many of us are keen on voluntarily broadcasting their lives to the world. We are actively contributing to this ocean of data that is basically an essence of our online existence. For example, it is one thing that our location data is being recorded by Google, but what can be made of the pictures we share on Instagram, blatantly showing off where we are and what we are doing. Companies and the government are data hungry and humans are so full of themselves that they can’t stand the thought of being unnoticed. And this creates a recipe of disaster for anonymity on the Internet.
Artificial Intelligence is burgeoning and algorithms are becoming smarter, quicker and more efficient in the way in which they make use of the information available to them. Algorithms today don’t need a complete and connected dataset pertaining to a person in order piece together a decent analysis. Even if there are attempts of scrambling sensitive information in order to lose meaning in the shuffle, computers are pretty good at recognizing even the feeblest of patterns and eventually singling out humans from these patterns. One example of how efficient machine learning techniques are at extrapolating personality trait from a very basic set of data is given in a study that used Facebook likes of few million people and predicted things like sexual orientation, political views and general personality. The study showed that with a few hundred likes, the algorithm does a better job at predicting a person’s behavior than all of that person’s friends, family and spouse. It is established that keeping secrets from family and spouse is never easy, then how can a person’s privacy be kept from such algorithms that know more with so little amounts of data? The simple answer is that it is impossible to maintain privacy specially with amount of access we have allowed in our lives. The fact of the matter is that cracking privacy is like finding patterns and computers are pretty good at cracking patterns specially when we are not making it hard for computers by providing as much data as they like.
Attempting to protect privacy in my opinion is a lost cause. All the companies that employ user data need to be regulated. But how can we have hope when the regulator i.e. the government itself is big on gathering data from people and using it to control us. To be honest, I don’t see much harm in all of this. I am not complaining about the lack of privacy, I am just stating its inevitability. For me, privacy is relevant with respect to other people. As long data is being kept from people in a person’s social circle, it is fine if some corporation uses it further their business. Afterall, the overall goal is to better server the consumer and if that’s the case then I see no problems with our behavior being monitored. Instead of making futile efforts to stop being controlled and monitored, we should make efforts to ensure that we are being controlled and monitored for the right reasons.
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