‘I’m Not Worried About My Data’

I hear the phrase “I’m not worried about my data” all the time. I’m sure most of you have heard it, or one of its many siblings (“I have nothing to hide,” “Who cares if Facebook has my dog pictures,” etc.) at some point in the last year. Many of you have probably said something to this effect as well. It’s a difficult position to discredit, and one that invites rebuttals into the silly realm of fear-mongering and futurism. But it’s also a dangerous position.

Most fears in everyday discussion about internet privacy focus on one of three things: cybersecurity risks, like compromised social security numbers, special-case hypotheticals like celebrity blackmail, or, most recently, election tampering. Each to a varying degree is a problem in its own right. Centering the data privacy discussion around them, however, also distracts from the greater risks of not having internet privacy, which go beyond compromised passwords and even election tampering because they affect everybody at an individual level.

These risks originate from two realities that statements like “I’m not worried about my data” dismiss. First, we broadcast infinitely more of ourselves to the internet than we are willing to acknowledge. The internet has stopped being a product we consume but a space we inhabit. A modern town square, the internet today is a hub of human activity, a new ecosystem for life.

Picture yourself embarking on a routine visit to check your mail in this square. On the way you’re hailed by a friend on Snapchat and stop to chat. Continuing along, you window shop for a while on Amazon. Later a New York Times headline catches your eye and you take a moment to skim it. Finally you make it to your mailbox and go through your mail.

Physically you have not entered a new space, but in every other respect you have. Aspects of yourself are transmitted at every turn — data like your reading interests, your attention span, and the things you say, but also metadata, like your openness, your IQ, your conscientiousness, your extroversion, your neuroticism. These last five categories aren’t made up or futuristic, but just a sampling of the data we discovered Cambridge Analytica was collecting from unsuspecting Facebook users almost two years ago.

Advances in data processing will only make this information more readily accessible. To see the internet as a space in this way is critical to understanding and reforging our relationship with it. We should have as much of a problem with being spied on when we inhabit the web as we should if we were to walk into a restaurant that had cameras all around tracking us — with the same compelling reasons we sense, intuitively, as to why this is wrong.

Which brings me to my second point: The potential for misuse of this information is vast and imminently actionable. Forget about the embarrassing and uncomfortable things we keep private, and think about how often we require privacy in the simplest sense of wanting to be able to choose what side of ourselves to present to the world. The employer you don’t want to know about your procrastination habits because you might not get the job if they did. The bougie bar you don’t want to know about your stinginess because they might not let you in if they did. The dating app you don’t want to know your relationship faults because it might screen you from other users if it did. The loan writer you don’t want to know your IQ.

To some extent I’ve cherry picked examples that allow me to point out how easily the web can figure these things out about us from the data we provide it. On the other hand, I’ll just say that it was pretty easy to find these, and I could have chosen 100 different ones and still not have covered all my bases. It’s dangerous to lose control over facts about yourself the moment it becomes expedient for someone else to know those facts, at your loss.

The more intimately we intertwine ourselves with the internet world, combined with the more insightful our algorithms become, the more control we cede over these sorts of facts. You may think greater intensification of these two developments is needed for these facts to become important. Or you may be like me, and think that too much of who we are has already been lost to the memoryless web. At the very least, acknowledge that you do have something to hide.

William A. McConnell ’21 is a Mathematics concentrator in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.