Privacy: You Have Nothing To Fear

This is something I've long been worried about myself. But lately I've begun to question the assumptions that this position is based on. Clearly we're moving into a world where it's possible to know more about people's behaviour than ever before. This has positive and negative aspects. There is a set of freedoms that we used to enjoy by default—simply because nobody could know enough about our behaviour to deny them to us.

This sort of alarmist article seems to follow the same sort of pattern—the author notices that we're being tracked in ways that were unimaginable only a few years ago, and worries because, who knows how this data will be used? It could be really bad!

While I share that worry, I'm beginning to wonder what, exactly we're worrying about. What, concretely, is the scenario that we want to prevent? Is it all-intrusive advertising? Is it systematic discrimination? Is it violence?

It seems that privacy advocates will have much more success if they identify the specific scenarios they want to avoid and work on preventing those. That will allow the benefits of ubiquitous data to be realized, while providing more direct protection of the freedoms we want to preserve.