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It is one of my greatest hopes as a journalist to get across a fundamental idea: your individual privacy is not the thing under greatest threat. (1/15)
Your privacy has been largely traded away already. It’s your individuality and autonomy within a system built on data that is really in danger, and really worth worrying about. (2/15)
I hear over and over again the words “privacy” and “data” uttered in the same sentence, as if they are interchangeable. “Your privacy” and “your data” are, in fact, two very different things. (3/15)
And while it’s easier to understand the threat to privacy, it’s the data threat that’s more important, in my view. (4/15)
Let’s take Facebook as an example. The company’s business model doesn’t require it to compromise your privacy. (5/15)
In fact, Facebook doesn’t need to know your name and address to do what it does. What it needs is reams and reams of data about what you’ve liked and shared and scrolled back to. (6/15)
Facebook uses your data not to compromise your personal identity, but to create an alternative portrait of who you are, and to then compare that portrait to the portraits of millions of other people who share your interests. (7/15)
And in doing so, as it fits you into smaller and more specific categories, it becomes better and better at predicting what you’ll want to buy, read, and vote for. (8/15)
This is why the company is able to offer not just eyeballs to its advertisers — it guarantees BUSINESS OUTCOMES to the majority of them. Not just the chance to sell something. A guaranteed SALE. (9/15)
That’s how well they know who you are…so well they don’t actually have to know who you are. (10/15)
And when we get caught up in worries about individual privacy, we miss the longer, bigger social changes that giving up our data will create. (11/15)
For instance, the announcement that Apple and Aetna are teaming up to create a new health-tracking insurance offering was accompanied by a lot of earnest talk about protecting privacy. cnbc.com/2019/01/28/app… (12/15)
But individual privacy is not the thing under threat here. The threat is that feeding small amounts of your data into a system will give companies the ability to make systemic judgements about your future once enough of us have participated. (13/15) nytimes.com/interactive/20…
The feedback loop of data will create a systemic change that sweeps you up into it without your conscious understanding of having participated. (14/15)
That’s why giving up your data, not just your privacy, is worth thinking about, and why we should learn to separate the two terms: it’s easy to hide the data threat behind reassurances about privacy. Their implications are tied together, but dangerous for distinct reasons. (ENDS)
