Exposed

1Privacy Cases: Being Suborned

“Well … how did I get here?”

—David Byrne, “Once in a Lifetime”

To discuss the relative merits of personal privacy, it's worth reviewing historic rationales and justifications for security processes and programs. Privacy and security have become linked to the point where the ideas are almost inextricable, and it is valuable to understand how this came to happen.

Security Through Trust

One of the concepts that relates to privacy is security through trust— an institution, government, or company is considered more trustworthy if the personnel working in or for it are themselves trustworthy. To determine whether a person is trustworthy, it's important to learn certain things about the person: their behavior, tendencies, condition, mindset, and so forth. Trust is established based on past performance; we tend to believe that someone will act more or less in a manner similar to how they already have. The assumption is: a lying junkie will continue to be a lying junkie; a person who has worked diligently and honorably for their entire adult life will continue to behave diligently and honorably. There are, of course, outliers and changes in circumstance where predictions are wildly unhinged from the past; the junkie might change overnight and become a paragon of virtue and a hard worker, whereas the model employee might turn into a depraved murderer in a moment. Human beings are fickle, unpredictable, irrational creatures. But if you have to trust ...