Privacy is a Dying Expectation

Offline, most people have a reasonable expectation of privacy and a decent amount of luck making sure that certain things are off-limits. Unless you’re unfortunate, nobody is going to look through your window, search through your computer, or otherwise collect little tidbits of information to have their wicked way with. It seems a little bit bizarre, then, that we can expect none of this on the internet.

Perhaps due to this ongoing invasion of our online selves, privacy is considered the greatest of the web’s treasures. Increasingly, though, the concept is a bit of a pipedream – especially on social media websites. Yes, much of the allure of Facebook and Instagram (etc.) is in sharing who you are with people you’re interested in but it’s not always easy to see how privacy fits into that definition.

A quick glance at a friend’s social media page can reveal their name, date of birth, pets’ names, birth location, hometown, and a host of other things. While this might seem mostly innocent, especially if your account is sealed off to peepers, this kind of information can serve as the key to password reset forms, which can compromise large parts of your online identity.

If we consider the fact that most internet users still have very poor password hygiene, privacy and security can be very low almost as a default position. A study from ExpressVPN revealed that the average person uses the same password for at least six different websites, with 2 in 5 people making the unusual decision to use some variant of their name as a security key.

The same piece of research also revealed that common passwords can be regional. The password ‘qwerty’ becomes ‘azerty’ on the continent, while Turkey’s collective fondness for the band Anathema means that the name actually ranks as the top most-used password in the country. Sadly, this creates a bit of a dire situation.

Believe it or not, a single password and access to an email account can be enough to cause chaos in your entire online world. Emails act as a repository of every service, store, video game, bank, and social media page you’ve ever interacted with. If you reuse passwords, something which is still very common, all anybody has to do is try it against places online where they know you have been.

Surveillance Capitalism

All that considered, there’s a feeling that lots of web surfers either don’t care about sharing information online or that they’re unaware of its value to criminals. There’s also the possibility that, following decades of breaches, users are simply too jaded to keep fighting for their privacy. It’s hard to blame them. Surveillance capitalism, i.e. money earned from obtaining people’s data is both a real and completely legal thing.

Back in 2019, a report in The Harvard Gazette implied that harvesting data for sale was capable of eroding autonomy and democracy. Shoshana Zuboff, the author mentioned in that article, believed that companies like Google had managed to turn something ephemeral – human experience – into raw material, something tradable. Put another way, what you do online relates to what you might buy, and that information can be sold.

Can privacy really be the internet’s forbidden riches, though? A primer on the website of the ICO describes how Europe’s GDPR legislation has made some progress in making sure that companies are accountable to users. It’s hard to deny that expectations of online privacy are tinged by cognitive dissonance, though. We know we don’t want to sell our information yet we still agree to it on a daily basis by signing into stuff.

To end on a lighter note, the overreach of internet giants has begun to alarm plenty of watchdogs and governments around the world, which could mean that we may one day have greater control over where our data ends up. For now, just try not to reuse your passwords too often.