Privacy Is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data

"This is both a philosophical and a polemical book: one that links big ideas to immediate actions in the real world. I see it as of a piece with important writing by philosophers like Evan Selinger and Evan Greer in the US, who have sounded the alarm around the normalisation of various kinds of surveillance and data collection. A lot of contemporary, AI-enabled technology is data hungry, with the broad promise that you give it your data, it can do more and more: keep you safe, make employees more efficient and more profitable, track students and optimise their learning, stop accidents, catch thieves or dissidents; and so on. Some of this may be true, or even desirable. But privacy is incredibly important. It’s the space within which various kinds of trust, self-authorship, self-control and thriving can take place. And it’s also very important to the civic contract: the ability of different people to meaningfully control their lives and have agency within them. A line I like in Veliz’s book is that, contrary to the idea that philosophy is about dispassionate consideration, it’s appropriate and indeed important to protest and to show anger in the face of incursions upon your liberty. Resistance is not futile, but necessary. In democracies at least, we are lucky enough to be able to say: no, we do not want ubiquitous surveillance in college campuses; no, we do not want everyone’s face being recognised in public places; no, we do not want databases of everyone who goes to a protest. We don’t want certain features of people to be tracked at all. Because the kind of power that this gives to the state, or corporations, or other small bodies of people, is dangerous and corrosive of a lot of the values we need in human society. A loss of privacy makes it easy for other people to have power over you and to manipulate you. Therefore, having control over that thing called data—which sounds so neutral—is powerful. Once again, it’s not neutral at all. It’s information about who you go to bed with, or what your children do, or who your God is. We’re back to the point I began with. Far from technology being a dispassionate expert arena, letting people harvest data about you in an unfettered way takes away your privacy and gives others power over you. And this doesn’t have to be the case. Some of us, at least, can push back against it, demand protections. It’s not inevitable. Between all these things, this is an eloquent and important book, and it’s one I enjoyed a lot. It’s a practical call for action, with examples that makes the case for action right now."