Member-only story
Oversight
Online Privacy Isn’t Dead—If We Fight for It
Breaking down the four fallacies around online privacy
You’ve probably heard the line a million times before.
In any debate about privacy — whether it’s among friends or on Capitol Hill — both defenders of surveillance and privacy nihilists will inevitably trot out the same tired trope: “Privacy is dead. It’s never coming back, so this is a pointless debate to begin with.”
This is just one of the many fallacious answers used by those who defend or excuse corporate and government prowling, alongside such gems as “How can you complain? You willingly gave away your privacy to Facebook,” and “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” These statements are clichés in the most nefarious sense, they’re boilerplate platitudes that reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of user preferences, and more dangerously, they give corporations and governments every excuse to continue down the same path of snooping.
Below, I’ve broken down the four worst anti-privacy generalities and shown why they are worrisomely off-base.
