We live in the age of surveillance capitalism, in which our data is harvested at a massive scale by corporations and sold to the highest bidder. Every day we see new data breaches, and governments regularly come up with bad ideas — like trying to force companies to introduce backdoors into their products, which are meant to give the government easy access to user data, but can (and will) be discovered and weaponized by cybercriminals.
We would be forgiven to think that privacy is a thing of the past, where we didn’t have cameras installed all around cities nor microphones in our pockets, where talking to someone meant meeting them in person, and the only ads were on TV or in newspapers, which inherently could not be targeted to a specific person.
I understand where this attitude comes from, and that it’s the way many people view the world, but I don’t think it accurately reflects reality.
Privacy will be dead if we let it happen. In many ways, we’ve seen privacy deteriorate over the course of this century, but it doesn’t have to be the end of it. We must remember that if enough people deem a cause to be doomed or a situation hopeless, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Together, by exercising personal digital hygiene, and fighting for our right to privacy when necessary in dealing with companies and governments, we can ensure the situation gets better or, at least, doesn’t deteriorate further.
In certain ways, there have been a lot of improvements on the privacy front. We’ve seen legislation passed that’s aimed at protecting digital rights (like GDPR and CCPA). The use of end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms has become widespread. Operating systems have introduced many features aimed at securing our data. The vast majority of Internet traffic is encrypted using HTTPS, which hasn’t been the case a decade ago, when Let’s Encrypt was introduced.
There are many ways each of us can improve our privacy and security online. It’s important to take small yet steady steps, improving our standing as we go. Privacy is a journey and a lifestyle. You don’t have to change everything in one day.
Perfect privacy doesn’t exist, but it’s all about making improvements. It’s like health. You won’t build muscle, lose a lot of weight, or improve your strength/flexibility by going to the gym or eating healthy for a few days. It’s about maintaining good habits in the long term.
Today, you start using a password manager, and over a week or two, you steadily change your passwords to secure ones. In a month, you may start thinking about finding a more private alternative to Google Chrome and installing a browser extension to block ads and trackers. In two months, you move to a secure messaging app. After a year or two, you might start to feel comfortable with using a (trustworthy — which not all are) VPN.
It’s important to remember that while online actors (like Google, Meta, or even cybercriminals) might have your past data, they don’t have your future data. Many kinds of data lose their relevance over time. Don’t let the mistakes of the past prevent you from making better decisions tomorrow. If you smoke, it’s not helpful to say that you’ve already done damage to your body, so quitting doesn’t matter. It does. Preventing further damage and potentially reversing at least a part of past damage matters a lot.