Just the other day, in a conversation about personal privacy, I overheard one adults say to another person, “I’ve got another to hide… “ I wanted to jump into the conversation, but instead I am republishing this 2013 blog post.
I often hear people of all ages, including children, say, “It doesn’t matter that my digital information is collected, because I have nothing to hide.” What bothers me most about this comment is the limited understanding that it demonstrates — a lack of knowledge about how fast the traditional walls of privacy are tumbling down and how little of it has to do with the bad things that people do.
People who make the comment usually know little about what happens to collected digital data, most of it documenting everything we do in our daily digital lives and almost none of it destined to identify wrongdoings or help to find “bad guys.” So much data is now collected about each of us in so many different ways, that almost nothing about us cannot be found out.
Our phones document where we go, our cars move through intersections with mounted cameras…
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