Data privacy is an increasingly important issue in today’s world, from the European Commissioner’s plea last week for the UK to maintain the EU’s more stringent data privacy laws, to Yahoo’s enormous data breach and finally the renewed push for the pardoning of Edward Snowden.
I therefore think it is relevant to take a closer look at data privacy through the subject of ‘state surveillance’. Under the European Charter of Human Rights, ‘everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and correspondence’. However, in 2013 Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the ways in which US and UK governments undertake state surveillance. In the UK, all our communications are intercepted, to further be processed and searched at a later date. The rationale is to prevent terrorism and enhance safety; however these interceptions have been largely contentious because of the effect on individuals’ data privacy and our freedom of expression.
We consequently need to weigh up the right to privacy vs safety from terrorism when deciding whether this surrendering of our data privacy is unavoidable. The justifications for accessing our data are i) if we have nothing to hide, then what is the problem and ii) in a time where terrorism is a large threat to national citizens, data privacy is a necessary price to pay. According to the US security officials, state surveillance worked in aiding to uncover more than 50 terrorist attacks in 2013[1].
Aside from the fact that a right to privacy is a fundamental human right, the counterarguments explaining why the government should not be accessing this data are strong. One argument is to protect ‘intellectual privacy’[2]; if we are aware that our data is constantly collected then we lose an area to express our own ideas without being watched. A second argument is that supervision inclines us to the mainstream, when we know we are being watched, we are likely to act similarly to how we would expect others to.
In a hyper-digital world, especially with the Internet of Things, the benefits of surveillance are vast. Surveillance is not just used by governments, but also private companies, which can generate large amounts of money from the collection and sale of data. Advertising efficiency is maximised through behavioural advertising; our data is surveyed and advertisements are targeted at users based on the links we click on and our previous buying preferences. However, the extent to which this is happening is worrying. Facebook, who now owns the messaging service WhatsApp, are recording the brands we message about to then target our advertising. News publications increasingly tailor the articles that we are shown based on our ‘preferences’, and a Kindle device can track your reader behaviour down to the length of time spent on a specific page in a book.
We are living in an era where we have gradually allowed the unravelling of privacy. We willingly use applications such as ‘Find Friends’ on our phones, whereby our friends can see our location at all times and vice versa. The Internet of Things can help us on a daily basis, increasing efficiency, communication and even energy costs at home. However, this means that data collectors and controls are integrated into our appliances, such as our cars, our mobile phones and our watches. We have built an internet that is on the surface free to use, but when you look inside, there is the expense of our privacy. This has the potential to backtrack digital development and create a trust deficit, whereby our right personal data is being so impeded that we do not trust the internet, the greatest facilitator that has been built.
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