For seemingly time immemorial, one of the chief rights prized amongst the ‘people’ whether they be subjects of a dictatorship or citizens of a democracy has been privacy. It is a “right” that is valued so highly because it it is one that has, historically, been very rare. Especially in dictatorships, governments begin with the idea that all aspects of your life are under their purview. That, as a dutiful subject, you should do nothing against the wishes of that dictator and, if commanded, it is your duty-by tradition and law-to do as you’re told. Dictators often try to curry favor by granting aspects of privacy to their citizens, but each one is viewed as a gift rather than right. This can be seen as one of the differences between the British Democratic tradition, which usually sets its beginning with the rights granted in the Magna Carta and the American Democratic tradition with the idea that “all men are created equal.”
However, for all the highfalutin talk, Democratic governments historically follow basically the same pattern. Though our privacies are valued very strongly, we are expected to give up the right to them as soon as it becomes a measure of national interest, like in a wartime. The battle of democracy versus autocracy that dominated the 20th century can be seen as being being played out in the way governments approach the issue of privacy: Democracies; giving their citizens much more privacy in their home life work life etc.; and big brother style autocracies curtailing those privacies. Now-where is the supposed right to privacy more enthroned than in America, at least rhetorically. This is partially because our founders created this country as a buffer against intrusion into their lives. Their sometimes-paranoiac fear was directed almost totally towards government, and with good reason. Really until the first half of the twentieth century the only organization big enough and powerful enough to invade individual privacy on a large scale were governments.
That is no longer the world we live in. The technologies of the 20th century, particularly the computer chip, make it ludicrously easy to “invade” each other’s privacy. By and large we trust the massive private corporations that have created service industries around this technology more than we trust our government. Apple knows where many of us are all times, Facebook knows about all those drunken parties we threw before we were 21, Google boasts that soon it will be able to know us well enough to generate our shopping lists, Visa knows what you bought yourself for your birthday, EZ pass knows how late you were out last night, etc. This makes people nervous but enough to stop using these very useful services. But can you imagine how people will react if all these private enterprises were controlled by some ‘evil overreaching’ government? They would be heralded as the end of democracy, that our society was descending into the realm of repressive dictatorship.
But why is this? Perhaps it is because when we naïvely hold onto the belief that the Internet is a beautiful free open source Wonderland, to the old maxim that corporations would never do anything that could risk losing or hurting us, their clients, and to trust in rainbow world of the ‘Free Market’. Of course, all of these dreams are lies
And lie begins very basically. Ask yourself, Facebook, Google, EZ Pass, Visa: are we really their clients? Partially, but, as far as I know, I’ve never paid anything directly to a corporation like Google or Facebook. We, the users, are not their clients. We are the product. It is much the same for the companies that we do pay, after all, our dues are minuscule compared to the amount they receive from the ultra rich and corporations. This is not corporations behaving badly... its under-regulated corporations behaving as they are designed to. In the end, a corporation exists not to promote the greater good of society but to make its shareholders as much money as possible. The closest a Corporatists gets supporting some sort of “greater good” is through their sacrosanct ‘cost benefit analysis’. This is, of course, not used to find out the costs and benefits to the general public but only the cost and benefit of its shareholders. This means using all of their resources to make as much money as possible, including selling the information we freely give to these corporations to the highest bidder. That is what capitalism is. Corporations are not founded to support some sort of moral good, they’re designed to be entirely amoral entities, concerned with morality only so much as it affects their bottom line.
On the other hand, democratic governments exist to serve the will and interests of the people. The “shareholders” are not a subset of the population but the entire population at large. The cost-benefit analysis performed by a democratic government is meant to be directly proportional to the costs and benefits to all of the citizens of that nation. Of course, all too often political decisions are based purely by a cost-benefit analysis for a particular politician’s next election. But the existence of craven self interest and corruption does not mean that the idea behind the democratic governance is wrong. If our representatives passed legislation only for personal or political gain it is in the authority of the citizens to elect new and better representatives. Just look at what citizens of the state of Wisconsin are doing to their governor, trying to recall him barely a year into office. Yes, that is proof that they have a very poor governor, but also proof that the will of the people cannot be ignored in a Democracy. The same is simply not the case with corporations. Unless you hold a gigantic steak the company, it is nearly impossible to force change upon it, -particularly a specific (policy) rather than general (personality) change. Besides, even if all the old fears come true and we are taken over by some kind of repressive dictatorship, don’t you think they would seize all of this “private” information that we have shuttled into the arms of corporations? And what makes you think those corporations are not already selling the information, without proper democratic oversight, to factions within or currently involved in directly influencing our government? Whatever is making you think that... stop thinking it, because its already happening.
The supposed trump card played by those who fear government is that while participation in private enterprises is purely voluntary, government programs would in some way be mandatory. If they did include some kind of opt out clause, it would work in a way that made taking that option incredibly difficult. Well, how many people think that choosing not to engage in privately controlled enterprises like being part of a social networking site, have your cell phone, using GPS, having an e-mail account, having a credit card, or using a search engine would not negatively affect our lives? It may be possible to get away with not engaging in all of those behaviors, but, for many of us, it would be impossible to succeed in society without using some of them.
So, we, as a society, have three choices. The first and, unfortunately, most probable is stasis. The products and services provided by these corporations are now integral to our lives. If Facebook loses clients, it will probably signaled the rise of Google+, not a broad rejection of social networking sites in general. We all may have our problems with society today but that does not mean we are eager or even willing to just broadly reject it. Perhaps attitudes will change, but people seem to like the services provided by these corporations. I certainly do, and as long as they remain the only option, I will probably go on using them.
The second option is to truly put our money where our mouth is in terms of wanting privacy. If we wouldn’t want a government to see or learn something piece of information, make it illegal for any organization to do so. Ban Facebook! Shut down all the search engines! Only use tender for financial transactions! Really, try rolling back technology to a point where privacy in the absolute was still even possible. Of course this is a horrific idea for two major reasons. The first is that such a policy would destroy the world as we know it. All across the globe we, as a species, rely heavily on our technologies. It might be theoretically possible to create a totally private Internet or cell phone service etc. but it would be fundamentally different and almost infinitely less useful than what exists today. The second reason is that rolling back or limiting the usefulness of our technological advances is a practice almost exclusively used by the most repressive authoritarian states. North Korea, China, Iran etc. They have done this not as a means of increasing privacy but as a means of increasing control. Even of our intentions were good such an action would carry untold consequences. Chief among them the dissolution of the positive social changes brought about by democratic society. The point isn’t these corporations are, by nature, evil. In fact, the services they provide, particularly those based on the internet, are phenomenal Progressive tools. The challenges confronting an authoritarian government grow exponentially when the populous has access to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. However, we cannot ignore that all of these corporations operate without the public’s control and, when protected by government privacy laws, often without oversight.
And the point would not be the rid ourselves of these corporations. Clearly private enterprises stalwart against autocracy. Without the internet all of dictators under attack in the Arab Spring and worldwide would be sitting much more easily. Without Google it would have been much harder for me to set up this blog. I am not arguing for some Soviet/Chinese pseudo-communist state that controls everything. What I am arguing for is to look seriously at the world around us and say... Has our almost unbounded fear of the possibility of an autocratic big brother state led us to embrace something worse.
The third option is that we realize that we are living in a world where privacy as our ancestors knew or dreamed of it is a thing of the past, and confront that knowledge head on. Simply because of the technological advances our society now relies upon what was private is now public. Do we want that information bought and sold in the semi-regulated ‘free market,’ controlled by private organizations listening to the edicts of a tiny percentage of the population. Or would be preferred under the control of the government, of the people, by the people, for the people? Rather than going all the way, starting to check Govbook, search Govoole, and swipe our Mastergov, what progressives can do about this issue is to promote greater governmental oversight and transparency. Corporations should not be allowed to sell our information without our knowledge. They should not be able to gather our information without our knowledge (and sorry, those 100+ page contracts that people always just skip through isn’t enough). People and corporations should not be able to buy that information without us knowing who they are, how much they paid for it, and what they’re going to do with it. However, it seems like our government has had more interest in protecting the privacy of those transactions than in the privacy of its citizens. Transparency is not just for governments. In a Progressive society, we should be able to see exactly what the corporations we rely upon are really doing. After all, its just bringing those transactions into the twenty first century. The back-room deals of corporatists, the tax returns of the millionaires running for president, just what all of the CEOS who have received bonuses since their companies were bailed out, these should not be the final privacies protected by our government. Transparency, not privacy, is the means to a Progressive future.
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