Confidentiality

Bad people, criminals, big businesses, and authoritarian states want to use you, via your data. They want your money, or they want to use you to spy on your friends. How much effort should you spend on fixing this?

Some. The trick is to triage.

First up, do not get hung up thinking you are a special agent who needs to hide from the NSA. If the NSA cares about you, you are not my target audience; I’m sure someone else in your concrete bunker is way more expert than me anyway.

On the other hand, I recommend against thinking you have nothing to hide, no matter that you are not a spy. For one thing, you have to hide your bank login from criminals, or they can take your money. That much is easy, and we have good selfish motivations for that.

There is also a pro-social argument for privacy.

Short version: Even if you personally had nothing to hide, and if you were so committed to leading such a facile, insipid life that nothing you have ever done will ever offend anyone, nor be used as leverage by people with power over you, that every boss, colleague, and friend would regard everything you have done as saintly, (and I reiterate, I cannot begin to imagine how boring you must be if this is the case, but you do you) then you still should be asking if you have the right to make that call for your loved ones. Your friends and family don’t deserve to have you spraying their personal histories over the internet for them.

If everyone you know and care about always has been and always will be free from any sensitive issue, alcoholism, a minority sexuality, a fringe religion, a neurodivergence diagnosis, a gambling habit, a lapse of judgement… Good for you, I guess?

But have sympathy for the rest of humanity, and our desire to protect our imperfect wonderful loved-ones, I beg you. Keeping other people’s confidences, for the rest of us, is a matter of duty of care.

It can be hard work. Business plans that monetize our failure to keep confidences are rife.

Privacy is a weakest-link phenomenon. Do not be the weak link. Instead, for us normal people, the rule should be: Start by not giving your information away for free to everyone.