"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks." - United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12
Privacy: The fact that you have information you do not want made publicly available.
Let's get the stupid "I have nothing to hide" argument out of the way. As stated above, that's not what "privacy" is about. If you really don't have anything to hide, then download Element to your phone, configure it, and send me a message using the ID I posted with your bank account information including login credentials AND send me the code they'll text you when I log in (since the bank is very likely still practicing shitty fucking 2FA). What's that? You don't want me to have it?
So you DO have something to hide.
It's the same reason why we have doors on the toilet stalls in public restrooms. It's the same reason why we put curtains on our windows and lock our front and back doors. It's the same reason we put stuff in the glove boxes of our cars. We do not want it publicly available.
Sites like Facebook will track you, build up a profile, hoard that data, and sell it. Which is why I strongly suggest everyone delete their Facebook pages.
But who uses it and for what purposes?
Governments love getting their hands on this data. They use it to build profiles on you, and they would love nothing more than to exercise the type of control that China, North Korea, and Russia exerts over their citizenries.
Corporations are the ones who really aggregate this data. You know those extrodinarily lengthy terms of service? Buried in all that legalese is language that states they can collect, store, sell, and transfer your data, and if the company gets bought out by another company or party that collected data becomes property of the new owner. For example, some billionaire who grew up in Apartheid South Africa where his father owned a blood emerald mine spends $44 billion to buy a microblogging site because 1) he's going through a midlife crisis and 2) his wife left him. All of a sudden he has access to all of this data - basically the world's largest White Pages since you need a real phone number to sign up - and he shuts down accounts that were either critical of him or tracked his private jet using publicly available information.
Note: The types of hacker groups both of the above employ are often called "Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actors."
Data brokers are the people who either buy the data from the corporations or they will do what's known as "scrape" it from those websites. These data brokers will then publish your information on their website, which is how you have Google knowing where you live and who you're related to.
Cybercriminals, who are sometimes hackers, will perpetrate data breaches of the above and steal that information, which is then fed to some call center in India where they try to get you to mail large amounts of cash within books to a separate location, never to be seen again.
So who are the major players?
Facebook a.k.a. "Meta", obviously. They know your phone number. They know your email address. They know your legal name. They know what you look like. They know who you associate with. And they sell this data to anyone who has the money to pay for it. Mark Zuckerberg has made enough money doing this to the point where he has bought up entire residential blocks in Palo Alto and San Francisco, California as well as Lake Tahoe, Nevada and Kauai, Hawaii. Let me reiterate: HE IS RICH ENOUGH TO BUY UP RESIDENTIAL BLOCKS IN SOME OF THE HIGHEST-PRICED HOUSING MARKETS IN THE UNITED STATES. Because he is making money off of you and your willingness to leave the door to your stall in the public restroom open.
Another player in this is Palantir, owned by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel (who is on the opposite side of the political spectrum from Zuckerberg). His company aggregates and scrapes data from sites like Facebook. Remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal? Palantir was partnered with CA when they helped influence the 2016 election. They, too, sell their data to the highest bidders.
Yet another one is Twitter. Currently owned by Elon Musk, who is the idiot I was referring to under "corporations" earlier in this page.
So what is affected by all of that?
Free speech is definitely affected. Look at how many "internet tough guys" suddenly clam up when more eyes are on them. Likewise, people whose identities may be at risk in certain geographical locations will not feel free to express those identities.
Politics can also be skewed, the way Cambridge Analytica influenced the 2016 Presidential election and Brexit.
Data can be used as kompromat. Private communications and social media posts are often "cherry picked" and taken out of context (such as how Al Gore stated in 2000 that he helped pass legislation that created the modern internet and it was twisted by certain media outlets as him having said "I invented the internet").
Data can be aggregated to form a profile. This can affect medical coverage, insurance premiums, job prospects, credit scores, etc. If you want a real world example of this, use your favorite search engine to look up "China social credit system." Go on. Take a look. Don't be shy.
So what can be done about it?
It starts with one step, then another, then another, then another. We can't topple the digital surveillance empire in a single day, after all.
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