Privacy is obsolete in the era of internet
All those private data leakages are so frustrating. We all are too jealous of our personal information. We suffer when it turns out that our emails and telephone numbers appeared known to somebody we have not authorized. We get so angry when that happens, we manifest our moral outrage over Facebook and the other neglectful resources from which our data has flowed.
Has anybody asked oneself who was that entity who accustomed us to perceive our identity as +1xxxxxxxxx along with xxxxxx@gmail.com? It has happened not so long ago, by the way. Not more than a decade passed from the moment when the majority of us answered the question about our identity with something different than a telephone number and email. “I am an Indian”, “I am a programmer”, “I am a Republican” — our answers sounded like this back then. We printed our telephone numbers and email addresses on our paper name cards to present them to as many people as possible. We were glad when our contact details attracted the attention of a wide audience.
But at some unspecified moment, we suddenly changed our minds regarding our identity. Our contact details started acting like our true self. Our telephone number became the most protected secret, our email turned into something so intimate that only close relatives got the right to know it. The so-called personal data fetish made us too vulnerable to any kind of internet leakages. What is the reason for such a change in our behaviour?
Monetization would be, probably, the right answer on it. The very fact that our data becomes a traded commodity capable of bringing profits to those who hold it makes us so jealous of our hypothetically lost revenues. It seems our personal greed is the fuel for a new market of personal information. A set of quite brief private info is a commercial asset nowadays. It has a certain price. It is in a demand at a specific segment of the economy.
An entire industry has emerged from a confrontation between those who hold our data and the ones who would like to get access to it. Both hackers and anti-hacking solutions locked in combat for just a few lines of contact details that we willingly represented through our name cards in the recent past. And we all support this multi-billion market with the moral outrage of our stolen data.
What a funny paradox! Nobody of those who buy your personal data is interested in you as in a human. Moreover, they know nothing about you. They don’t care whether you are John or Mary. And namely, their lack of knowledge makes you commercially interesting for them. They buy data of millions of hypothetical consumers in bulk having no idea whether personally you can purchase something from them or not.
Any call centre management will tell you numerous stories about the same databases of the so-called “leads” — potential consumers that are sold and resold dozens of times from one call centre to another. Such a continuous migration of the databases is a vicious circle of tries and errors when the same audience is contacted by different sellers in order to transform a few lines of somebody’s contact details into a piece of revenue.
If the mercenary motives of advertisers and sellers are more or less clear with regard to personal data, what makes us — the ones who constitute the databases — appreciate our own contact info so much? Is it just a particular case of our mob mentality when we start appreciating what all the others evaluate worthwhile? Peer pressure plays some role in it, undoubtedly. But the root causes of such behaviour are internally psychological.
On the one hand, we feel like innocent victims when our personal data start travelling across the internet without our permission. What a bright feeling! The majority of us have little to no chance to feel innocent even in the smallest aspect of our mundane routine. Life is hard and cruel, we left our innocence in childhood.
On the other hand, we acknowledge there is something valuable in our digital personalities once hackers are paid for hunting them. This primitive logic indulges our sense of importance. And those who have nothing to be proud of except their personal data will face disappointment sooner or later.
The thing is that our private personal data does not belong to us. And there is another paradox regarding it. This is about uniqueness. There are thousands of individuals having the same names — John Smith, for example. So, our names are not unique in most cases. But every John Smith has a unique telephone number — a combination of figures which can never be duplicated. This is just technically impossible. The same relates to our email addresses — two absolutely identical addresses won’t work. All three pieces of data: name, telephone number, and email belong to our personal identification today. Two of them are absolutely unique. But from where do we get all those identifiers?
Your name belongs to your family’s history. In most cases, your parents were the ones who named you. But when you are an adult, you can change your name officially for a different one by your own volition. Nothing but your own imagination limits you in it.
What about your telephone number? Who offers you one or another unique combination of figures? Can you design your own combination? A GSM provider — a commercial organization having nothing personal with you provides you with a telephone number. Usually, you have a very limited choice between several available numbers that still belong to nobody until being purchased. Contractual obligations with your GSM provider determine a correlation between you as a physical individual and a particular combination of figures in your telephone number. Nothing personal, in fact, just business.
Can you voluntarily change your telephone number? Of course you can. But in such a case, a new contract with a GSM provider will come into force. In many countries where a SIM card can be purchased only against somebody’s passport (ID) data, changing a telephone number without valid objective reasons can be very problematic. To sum up, an average GSM subscriber has little to do with his/her “personal” telephone number in terms of changing it for a different one, not to mention modifications in its combination of figures.
The identification capabilities of a telephone number would be quite ephemeral unless the smartphone obsession covers the world. Today, a critical function that distinguishes you from all the others is endowed to your smartphone — payment. This is the right and at the same time ability of an adult individual.
When you pay with your smartphone you confirm that both you and your device constitute a single unit with regard to your bank account. Money (your money) is operated by a true cyborg — a combination of a human and a gadget. But the process goes due to a predetermined coincidence of two sets of figures — your bank account number and your telephone number. Where are you as a human in all that stuff?
Smart capabilities of smartphones keep evolving. Now you can unlock your car with a smartphone. If you own smart home, a smartphone is the only thing you need to control all your smart appliances. Inanimate things around us are becoming so smart that the day will soon come when we as alive personalities can appear redundant to operate the smart world.
There is only one frustrating aspect in this happy digital utopia: the smart digital environment is potentially hackable. It is just a matter of money paid to professional hackers to get access to all your digital instances. And know what? If you are conjoined with your digital identity, nothing prevents hackers to crack your inner self somehow.
From a purely technical perspective, no critical constraints are available to create your digital twin capable of shifting you as a living creature from all interactions associated with your digital identity. Just imagine what efforts it would cost you to prove that namely you, flesh-and-blood John Smith has more rights on everything constituting your social identity if your illegally created digital twin captures and changes all your passwords. And the most discouraging thing in it is that we assist creating such twins on our own.
Facebook has already disclosed dozens of millions of its users’ data sets to some third-party resources. No matter whether the personal info is stolen by hackers or voluntarily resold by Facebook. What do people usually do on Facebook? They thoroughly create their digital identities through continuous modifications applied to their stories. They add photos and videos, they share locations, they post various information having oftentimes a very personal origin. Just discover what an advanced technology of deepfake is already available and realize that you are one step from a naturally looking digital twin whose mission can be replacing you from what you always consider your public identity.
The very vulnerability of the so-called private data hints at a possible solution to the problem of data leakages. What if any secrecy of the users’ digital identifiers is cancelled? When all our personal information is freely available, no commercial value will be inherent in everything we post about ourselves on the internet. Private data could be placed as an open-source file. Any hacking and any leakage would be senseless in such a case. This is similar to the situation with Windows and Linux: why to pay for quite expensive software if a better analogue is available for free?
Note, please, that full transparency does not mean any lack of security of information. On the contrary, the more transparent a solution is, the stronger security can be provided for it. The task comes to the selection of proper internet technology for our private data. Nothing more immutable than distributed ledgers is available now to collateralize our digital identifiers. Put your personal information into a blockchain and nobody will be able to embezzle your data any more. The horrible twin of your digital identity becomes merely impossible with blockchain.
Privacy, as we used to perceive it in the context of our personal data that erratically moves over the internet, is obsolete. Who can be confident in the integrity of one’s personal information if it is posted on social networks and e-stores? To believe a word Facebook says about the safety of your information is insane. The same concerns any other internet-based resource including insurance companies and banks. It is time to give up outdated biases about anything kept in secret on the internet. Secrets belong to conspiracy theories that do not maintain any criticism. Only full transparency of personal data can abolish all those measures of pseudo security that are seemingly taken by various responsible anti-hacking agencies and websites.
A user audience should come to a consensus regarding the current unnatural position of personal information available anywhere on the internet today. We’d better disclose our precious telephone numbers and emails for general access to nullify monetization of our digital identifiers. Free access to our private data will make hacking commercially meaningless. After that, we will probably realize that each of us is more valuable and multifaceted than just a few lines of figures and symbols that conventionally linked to our true selves.
