Assignment: Write about a specific issue you would like to politically engage with, that you feel would benefit from your activism. What is an approach you could use to enact that change? Aim for 500 words.

When we talk about privacy, we are not talking about secrecy. Secrecy implies that there is a specific reason to keep something undercover: someone can get hurt, it is illegal, someone would disprove… Not wanting to share information – meaning, keeping it private – does not mean that said information is bad, or that it is somehow harmful to someone; it simply means that we do not want to share it, full stop. The reasons can be as simple as stubbornness, or as complex as trauma. Nevertheless, we are all in our right to chose what to talk about, what to share with others, what not to make public, and how we engage this information with the outer world.

The ‘war on terror’ that has been going on since 9/11 forever changed how we talk about information. When we see we have no access to some info, we get worried : Is it evil? Can it harm me? Why is this hidden? Why can’t I know this? While we citizens might not necessarily see things this way, organizations and governments do. And they have power over us, whether we like it or not. So the notion of privacy now goes in hand with secrecy, because of how hard it is to keep: if you want something private, you have to go the extra mile, and there is no thing as futile effort. The internet forever changed how we talk, how we interact, how we share information. In a media where connectivity and sharing is primordial, privacy is often overlooked in the search for publicity. We publish our pictures, where we live, where we went to school, who we are friends with, where we work, where we hang out, what we like to do… Be it to communicate with friends, to look for a job or to simply have an ‘online persona’, what we share online has much more than we think it does. For example: a picture can have much more information than one might think. A knowledgeable actor can get the model of the phone/camera with which it was taken, the original picture (if it was cropped), the geolocation, facial parameters, among other tidbits of data. And you just shared all this to strangers in the internet.

The consumer is not at fault for being at risk. It is the platforms, the media, the websites, the corporations profiting behind it, the ad market, that are the guilty party. If a person ignorantly puts themselves at risk, is it their fault for not knowing? Or is it the fault of the exploiter for taking advantage? For a long time we have blamed ‘human error’ for anything and everything, instead of putting the oppressive systems in the spot for the irresponsible way they conduct business. Let’s just remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Consequences go way beyond the individual, but put entire communities at risk, no matter how large or small.

I am passionate about this. Privacy, data, information, and sharing. The internet has changed how we interact with each other and how we share things, and with a new player in the game, the world has trouble catching up with it and keeping the older systems integrated with it. Human rights, abuse, crime: things that were once only physical can now be much more intangible, and the current powers don’t know how to deal with it – or sometimes, they use it to their advantage, surveying their citizens and breaching their rights because there is no guide on what is acceptable, and what is not.

There is ongoing work on how these ‘Big Brothers’ are illegal, immoral and violate the declaration of human rights. Edward Snowden started this in 2012 when he pulled the veil of PRISM and all the NSA spying, and since then, countless other people have joined and put their lives and jobs at stake to keep fighting the problem. But I think that for them to have more ground to step forward on, there needs to be some guideline, some integration of how the internet has changed the way we conduct ourselves and the existing systems. For example: the police needs a warrant to search your home, but they don’t need a warrant to ask ISPs or websites for your information, even when what is there is MUCH more telling than what you may have at home. What you have at home shows your private life; what you share in the internet, either willingly or not, shows your entire life. Why has the law not adapted to this? How can we make it better? And more importantly,  how can we hold governments and systems accountable?