Mr Privacy

"Mr Privacy" is what my wife has started to call me lately. At the beginning I did not like it but now I am fond and proud of the nickname. She says I am too concerned with privacy, specially since I don't let her take a look on whatever is that I am doing on my smartphone or the laptop. Well, that is my right, at least in this country: USA. But besides the wife's rights to sniff on everything the husband does, the truth is that protecting one's privacy is not only one's right but also an economical mandate.

In this time and age of social media and over sharing (seriously, who cares what you are doing every moment of your life), we have stupidly given away the ownership of our information. In other words, we are giving away money. If you think about it a little bit, all the information you are willingly sharing and not (remember all the free apps in your smartphone? want to guess what they are tracking from you?) is being used by all the Internet-based companies to generate profits: your every move, your driving patterns, any click on any web page, browser history, contacts information on your phone, etc.

That's right, in case you did not know it already, your information is valuable to these companies. So, why aren't we protesting about it? Why are we allowing them to profit from our data? Where is our share in this big pile of money? If you are not outrage by now, then I don't know what else to tell you. Sure, I could go ahead and rant about the civil rights and our rights to anonymity and so on. But that has been done before and I have not seen any massive complains yet. Maybe we are just too busy making a living to focus on anything else. I know I am. At least, I am hopeful for people like Evgeny Morozov who are thinking about these things and trying to do something about it. And I think he has summarized it - during this interview with New Left Review - in these 3 great paragraphs I want to share with you:

- "... we know that there is a huge market in exploits. If you have the money, you can exploit even open-source software. Who has the money? The NSA, of course."
- "Now that ‘the Internet’ is spreading into everything—education, healthcare (with the ‘quantified self’), and all the rest—we’re in danger of ending up with a kind of idiot history..."
- "If current economic, social and political trends continue, we could conceivably end up with data-driven automation for the poor—so that all their time can be spent working—while the rich enjoy cultivating their senses, learning languages, getting to know art, studying."

I hope one day we look back and we are able to say: "Gosh! How stupid we were as a society to let that happened. So glad we were able to correct it on time". Maybe we won't see it, but I hope the next generation does.

Bonus: A couple of videos about this subject from TED.

• What will a future without secrets look like?
• Why privacy matters?