Exposed

Introduction

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Arthur C. Clarke

The idea of privacy is that each human being should be able to decide who has information about them. It's an interesting concept: each person creating an island of data and limiting access to the island only to other entities the individual permits.

In practice, it doesn't work, meaning it's both impossible and incredibly harmful to everyone when privacy “rights” are imposed and enforced. This is true for a number of reasons, including human nature, modern technology, and the way data functions and affects interaction.

Today, many people say they want privacy—that they value control of their own information. There is an almost innate, reflexive horror at the idea that someone, anyone, could know something about us that we did not want them to know. Many of us do not feel comfortable with this idea: what if you had no privacy—what if everything you ever did or said was known to everyone else? Each of us may have a different image of the form of that discomfort. Who knows everything about me—the government? Corporations? My spouse? And what would they do with that information? Harm me? Track me? Sell things to me? When we conceive of a dystopia, fictional or real, that depiction usually includes some aspect of loss of personal privacy, from the Big Brother intrusive government of George Orwell's 1984 (the archetypical dystopia)¹ to modern North Korean governmental control ...