>>45
Because:
- Governments and corporations can (and
will) use your seemingly uninteresting personal data in novel and creative ways. When your right to privacy isn't respected, expect being sued for libel for telling your friend that a certain company is bad, being harassed by targeted advertising companies, or getting blackmailed about something that happened ten years ago. Privacy is about protecting the weak many against the strong few.
- Lack of privacy distorts the judiciary system far beyond what you would imagine. Given some facts regarding a person (their purchases in the last few months, their Internet activity, etc.), there is a non-zero probability
p that, purely by coincidence, they can be accused (and convicted) of something they didn't (intend to) do. Normally this doesn't happen that much because the police needs probable cause in order to poke around a person's private life, but if mass surveillance is used, you can directly multiply the probability
p by the population to get the number of innocent people that will end up in trouble for nothing. If this is a bit confusing, I'll re-explain: suppose you have this DNA-matching method that can accurately determine whether a person is the aggressor in a crime 99.9% of the time (and will give the wrong answer 0.1% of the time). If the prosecution is accusing someone whose presence was proven at the scene of the crime, and they have tons of other evidence, the DNA proof works just fine. But suppose the police has no leads of investigation, so they run a sample of DNA against a database with 10,000 entries. The odds that at least one will match, purely by chance, is (1 - 0.999
10000) = 99.9954%. Factor in some circumstantial evidence, tell the jury that the DNA method is 99.9% accurate, and you've successfully put an innocent person in prison.
- If your personal data/work
is interesting and/or monetarily valuable in any way, and your right to privacy isn't ensured (either due to mass surveillance or carelessness on your part), you can be sure someone powerful and unethical is there to spy on you and steal your work at the opportune time. If hiring a hitman for $200,000 can bring a company a profit of $50,000,000, rest assured that the value of human life (i.e.
your human life) will not be taken into consideration.
- Similarly, if you are an activist and you protest against something bad that a company or a government is doing, bits and pieces of your private life can be rearranged to discredit you (or worse). Often, even the right to privacy isn't sufficient in this case, and the stronger rights to anonymity and to cryptography are necessary.
- The right to privacy, when linked to the right to cryptography, forms a barrier beyond which nobody and nothing may intrude, thus ensuring absolute freedom of thought. It all becomes obvious if you consider the computer's storage device as an extension to its owner's highly limited human brain.
- Publicly forfeiting your right to privacy and discrediting its importance brings us, as a society, yet another step closer to an authoritarian nightmare.