Nobody Knows What They’re Afraid Of
My iPhone knows exactly where I am at all times, and I’ve gone out of my way to keep it that way. I’ve posted photos of my genitals on questionable porn forums. I’ve run an open-hearted blog for years where I detailed fights with ex-girlfriends, family disasters, things a normal person might want buried. Every new web service I sign up for, I throw every privacy setting to maximum exposure and move on. Google knows me, therefore I am—that used to feel like something worth saying. At the beginning.
So I’m clearly not the right person to be precious about data privacy. But I’ve also grown exhausted watching people who live exactly like me mock everyone else for being scared of it.
The fear isn’t irrational. The fear is: someone will use what I’ve given away against me. That a corporation will know I’m cheating on my partner, or gambling away money I don’t have, or harboring some embarrassing habit I’d rather keep quiet—and that someday, somehow, this information will be weaponized. That’s not paranoia. That’s pattern recognition from people who’ve watched institutions fail them their whole lives. The tech crowd laughs at this every single time. Unjustly.
The contradiction that gets mocked the most is a real one: someone furious about Google photographing the front of their house while happily letting Facebook run facial recognition on every photo they’ve ever uploaded. Someone terrified of a skimmer on an ATM while logging into their bank through some half-built portal that looks like it was coded during a hostage situation. We point at these people and say: look at the inconsistency, look at the stupidity. But we’re leaving out the one thing that explains everything—they don’t know. Not because they’re stupid. Because nobody told them, and the information landscape is designed to make sure they stay confused.
They’re not living in a web café with a MacBook and a chai tea, cultivating opinions about data sovereignty. They’re people who check Facebook and play browser games and occasionally get a scary news segment about corporate surveillance shoved in their faces between ads. They’re drowning in terms-of-service agreements written by lawyers specifically to exhaust anyone who might read them. Every week there’s another story about another company doing something awful with data, each one packaged with colorful logos and a breathless tone that suggests civilization is ending—and then nothing happens, and then there’s another story next week. Of course people freeze up. Of course they apply their anxieties inconsistently. They’re trying to make sense of something that was deliberately made senseless.
The digital-native crowd—the one that lives and breathes this stuff, that I belong to, that you probably belong to too—has taken the laziest possible position: we mock. We screenshot the confusion and post it. We write contemptuous threads about boomers blocking Street View while their entire lives are indexed by Google. I’ve done it. It feels clever for about four seconds and then it’s just mean.
What’s actually happening is that these people’s instinct is correct and their execution is inconsistent, and that inconsistency is entirely explainable by information poverty. The surveillance capitalism machine is enormous and mostly invisible and changes shape every year, and keeping up with it is basically a part-time job. Most people don’t have that job. I sort of do—I live online, I have no life outside of it, I’ve made my peace with being known—but I know that’s not a virtue. It’s just a circumstance.
There are as many defensible positions on data privacy as there are people on earth. Mine is: I don’t care if anyone knows I jerk off to Japanese pop music. I don’t care if old party photos resurface. I’ve done enough embarrassing things publicly that the archive of my embarrassments has become, in a way, armor. But that’s a choice I made with full knowledge of what I was choosing. That option should be available to everyone—not as a gotcha about their inconsistency, but as an actual navigable decision between people who understand the landscape and people who are just trying to get through the week.
So: stop spreading panic without context, stop laughing at the confused, start actually explaining things when someone asks. That’s the whole program. It’s not complicated. If you actually understand how this stuff works, then you have a responsibility that comes with that understanding—and it’s not the responsibility to feel superior. It’s to be useful. Once we get that right, maybe we’ll have time to worry about the things that actually keep the lights on. Inflation. Climate collapse. Whatever’s currently topping the news cycle of civilizational dread. Pick one. There’s plenty to choose from.