Why Privacy Matters

Privacy is a fundamental human right. It is recognized in many countries to be as central to individual human dignity and social values as Freedom of Association and Freedom of Speech. Simply put, privacy is the border where we draw a line between how far a society can intrude into our personal lives.

Countries differ in how they define privacy. In the UK for example, privacy laws can be traced back to the 1300s when the English monarchy created laws protecting people from eavesdroppers and peeping toms. These regulations referred to the intrusion of a person’s comfort and not even the King of England could enter into a poor persons house without their permission. From this perspective, privacy is defined in terms of personal space and private property. In 1880 American lawyers, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis described privacy as the ‘right to be left alone’. In this case, privacy is synonymous with notions of solitude and the right for a private life. In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifically protected territorial and communications privacy which by that became part of constitutions worldwide. The European Commission on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights also noted in 1978 that privacy encompasses the right to establish relationships with others and develop emotional well-being.

Today, a further facet of privacy increasingly perceived is the personal data we provide to organizations, online as well as offline. How our personal data is used and accessed drives the debate about the laws that govern our behavior and society. This in turn has knock-on effects on the public services we access and how businesses interact with us. It even has effects on how we define ourselves. If privacy is about the borders which govern who we give permission to watch us and track aspects of our lives, then the amount and type of personal information gathered, disseminated and processed is paramount to our basic civil liberties.

An often heard argument, when questions of privacy and anonymity come up, goes along the lines of, “I only do boring stuff. Nobody will be interested in it anyway” or, “I have nothing to hide”. Both of these statements are easily defeated.

Firstly, a lot of companies are very interested in what boring things you do precisely so they have opportunity to offer “excellent” products fitting interests. In this way their advertising becomes much more efficient - they are able to tailor specifically to assumed needs and desires. Secondly you do have lots to hide. Maybe you do not express it in explicitly stated messages to friends and colleagues, but your browsing - if not protected by the techniques laid out in this book - will tell a lot about things you might rather keep secret: the ex-partner you search for using Google, illnesses you research or movies you watch are just few examples.

Another consideration is that just because you might not have something to hide at this moment, you may very well in future. Putting together all the tools and skills to protect yourself from surveillance takes practice, trust and a bit of effort. These are things you might not be able to achieve and configure right when you need them most and need not take the form of a spy movie. An obsessed, persistent stalker, for example, is enough to heavily disrupt your life. The more you follow the suggestions given in this book, the less impact attacks like this will have on you. Companies may also stalk you too, finding more and more ways to reach into your daily life as the reach of computer networking itself deepens.

Finally, a lack of anonymity and privacy does not just affect you, but all the people around you. If a third party, like your Internet Service Provider, reads your email, it is also violating the privacy of all the people in your address book. This problem starts to look even more dramatic when you look at the issues of social networking websites like Facebook. It is increasingly common to see photos uploaded and tagged without the knowledge or permission of the people affected.

While we encourage you to be active politically to maintain your right to privacy, we wrote this book in order to empower people who feel that maintaining privacy on the Internet is also a personal responsibility. We hope these chapters will help you reach a point where you can feel that you have some control over how much other people know about you. Each of us has the right to a private life, a right to explore, browse and communicate with others as one wishes, without living in fear of prying eyes.