Privacy for Sale

Edward Snowden’s name will always be associated with one defining act—blowing the whistle on the United States government’s mass surveillance program. At the time of this writing, he is still living in exile after releasing classified documents to the press in 2013 proving that these intrusive government programs existed. Some see him as a criminal (for instance the United States government), others as a suffering saint for the cause of personal privacy. Snowden obviously believed in what he was doing, but in his memoir he described a casual shopping experience that caused him to wonder if the risks he was taking were worth it.

Snowden and his girlfriend had stopped at a Best Buy to buy a new microwave when he happened upon a new piece of technology—a “Smartfridge” that was internet-capable. Its user could leave messages on it, check their calendar, watch YouTube videos, scan barcodes to track food freshness, and even make phone calls.

Snowden recalls:

“I was convinced the only reason that thing was Internet-equipped was so that it could report back to its manufacturer about its owner’s usage and about any other household data that was obtainable. The manufacturer, in turn, would monetize that data by selling it. And we were supposed to pay for the privilege. I wondered what the point was of my getting so worked up over government surveillance if my friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens were more than happy to invite corporate surveillance into their homes.”

As the public has increasingly bought into this kind of technology, “the data we generate just by living—or just by letting ourselves be surveilled while living… enrich private enterprise and impoverish our private existence in equal measure.” Snowden acknowledges the convenience of things like smart technology and cloud storage, but “the result is that your data is no longer truly yours” which he sees as a big problem because “the privacy of our data depends on the ownership of our data.” Social media adds yet another wrinkle as the “free service” they provide to us requires that we trade our personal information to social media companies to sell to the highest bidder—making us not customers but products sold to advertisers.

Some may find these concerns to be a little too abstract to raise a fuss about. If I choose to trade my private data for convenience, who does that hurt? But there’s another sense in which our constant connectedness assails our privacy—once we are plugged in, we find ourselves bombarded at all waking hours with the utterances of every person and corporation within our virtual circle.

Neil Postman described this phenomenon in its incipient form in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. In this media critique, Postman blamed the telegraph (!) for creating a hyper-connected world wherein each person is expected to keep up with “news from nowhere, addressed to no one in particular,” and about which most of us can do nothing: “In a sea of information, there was very little of it to use.” One of the results of this “news” saturated environment is that it dulls the senses. As the musician Derek Webb lamented in his cautionary science fiction concept album Ctrl—about a lonely man who joins his consciousness to the worldwide web—“I cannot feel because I feel everything.”

Paradoxically, “news from nowhere” can also heighten our emotional sensitivity by leaving us in a constant state of alarm. The most neurotic among us are hyper-focused on largely irrelevant controversies that are “very online” but don’t seem to touch our physical worlds at all—from the progressive New Yorker trying to get an Ohio construction worker fired for expressing culturally insensitive sentiments on X to the Tupelo, Mississippi man who spends hours of each day ranting about drag queen story hours at public libraries in Portland, Oregon.

The danger of having our perception warped by virtually constructed worlds isn’t just a danger for those along the political margins, though. Writer and social critic Coleman Hughes argued in The End of Race Politics that our exaggerated sense of the prevalence of negative news events—particularly as channeled through the ubiquity of smartphones—also led to a souring of race relations in the United States that previous polling showed had been on a consistent upswing. Thus, the intrusion on our individual and local lives that began with the telegraph and grew with television has become exponentially more intrusive with the advent of being always online.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt adds to this already unpleasant picture by interpreting the sudden and dramatic upticks in most western countries of rates of adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide as largely the result of the advent of the smartphone. Haidt argues that an unnatural hyper-connectivity at an age when self-identity is at its most fragile and social comparisons are an obsession—especially among young girls—is particularly dangerous. In addition, he notes that smartphone use has replaced the traditional “play-based childhood” that marks healthy development in all primate species. This, he argues, only makes the impact of smartphones more nefarious.

Indeed, the virtual world has replaced many of our previously organic social relations—for better and worse—including dating, education, and interfacing with friends. The fact that our private lives have merged with our online lives also means that the time that we used to fill with solitude, prayer, intimate moments, and creative thinking is approaching a vanishing point.

Are there any solutions to this problem of the virtual world spreading into our private world? The most obvious one would be to unplug completely. But much like Jesus’ recommendation of celibacy, “all men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given.” Those who believe that they derive some value from their smartphone, from social media, and from free cloud backups should of course be welcome to them—but they should be honest with themselves in assessing the costs and benefits. Do they want to be connected because it adds value to their lives: because it provides them more opportunities for personal, scholarly, or professional development than it does headaches and hostility? Or are they addicts convincing only themselves that they have everything in control?

Since our overuse of privacy-invading technology is a collective phenomenon, Haidt suggests collective approaches. These include non-coercive solutions like turning schools into no-phone-zones and parent groups agreeing together to take smart phones and social media from their kids, but also government-based approaches like requiring proof of age to create a social media account that are controversial among civil libertarians.

Andy Crouch also gives some suggestions in his book The Tech-Wise Family that could provide useful guardrails for parents looking for solutions on the individual and familial level. They include  “[creating] more than we consume,” remembering that “we are designed for a rhythm of work and rest” which leads to regular abstention from our devices, waking up “before our devices do” and make them “go to bed” before we do, “no screens before double digit” ages, and “we use screens for a purpose, and we use them together, rather than using them aimlessly and alone.”

These rules may not meet your own needs, or they may not go far enough. Despite what some activists argue, a one size fits all solution doesn’t actually fit all. That’s because privacy isn’t all or nothing—humans have always traded little pieces of our privacy. Collective societies have always favored community over privacy, but even in individualist societies privacy has always been a matter of choice. When I chose to get married, I also chose to give up some of my privacy. When we had kids, my wife and I both chose to give up a lot more privacy. Privacy is valuable, but like all stores of value it can be apportioned out and traded for something we value more. If having a fridge that can send you a text when your teenager finishes the milk is more valuable to you than the privacy you lose from this arrangement, that is a choice you are free to make. But count the cost before you do.