There’s this thing people say about privacy that I think is supposed to sound practical:
I've got nothing to hide. or worse; "..they already have everything anyway"
And I get why people say it. I really do. Because what are you supposed to do at this point, exactly? You need an email address, you need a phone, you need accounts for everything, half the jobs you apply for want a LinkedIn profile, everyone wants you to download an app, verify your identity, connect something, upload something, agree to something. At a certain point opting out starts to look less like privacy and more like making yourself unemployable or socially invisible.
So people put their head down.
“Surely if I don’t cause trouble, nobody is going to put me in the crosshairs.”
That is basically the bargain.
And I think that bargain is insane.
The problem isn’t even just that companies collect too much information. It’s that somewhere along the way we started treating this information as if it were reality itself. We call it “data” and suddenly it gets this almost scientific authority. But data isn’t reality.
Someone decided what to measure. Someone decided what counts. Someone decided what category you belong in. Someone built the system collecting it, someone designed the database, someone decided which behaviors are suspicious or valuable or profitable or worth retaining forever. Then all of that gets fed through an script and returned to us as some supposedly objective version of who we are.
Your purchases say this:
Your location history says this:
People like you usually do this:
Your behavior suggests this:
Your risk score is this:
At some point, the abstraction becomes more important than the actual person. And we’ve been conditioned to think this is intelligence. Not just intelligence. Better intelligence. The “machine” knows you better than you know yourself because it has enough data points. Even as a tech enthusiast and computer-lover myself, I can’t take that lying down. I’m not arguing that we should throw computers in the ocean or pretend statistics are useless. Obviously they aren’t. I’m saying we need to stop pretending that one very specific way of knowing the world—a mathematical abstraction captured through computational systems owned by a relatively small number of big companies—is somehow the supreme way of understanding human beings.
Because that claim happens to be extremely convenient for the people who own the machinery.
Examples of institutions defining people through data
Google knows what you want.
Meta knows who you are.
The credit agencies knows whether you are trustworthy.
The insurers know how risky you are.
The advertiser knows what will persuade you.
The platform knows what you should see or watch next.
Everybody gets to tell your story except you.
And this is where I think privacy gets discussed completely backwards. Privacy is always presented as secrecy.
"They want privacy, they must be hiding something."
That’s not the point.
I don’t need to be hiding anything to object to somebody constructing a permanent dossier about me. I don’t need to be committing a crime to object to being classified. I don’t need some embarrassing secret to think it is deeply strange that companies I have never heard of can buy, combine, infer, retain and resell information about my life.
Privacy should include the right to say: you do not get to author me.
You do not get to collect scraps of my behavior, turn those scraps into a model of who you think I am, and then quietly allow that model to follow me through the world.
And “they already have everything” is probably the worst reason imaginable to give them more.
That phrase sounds pragmatic, but what it really means is surrender. It means the system has become so normal that resisting it feels silly. And that is how these things become permanent.
Not because everyone agreed they were good. Because everyone decided resistance was inconvenient. Resignation becomes permission.