Privacy Does Not Exist

It's a scam and always has been

Yes, that’s right. You have no privacy. It’s an illusion. It’s based on a logical fallacy. Get over it. Privacy is a desire of human beings to hide that which they are ashamed or embarrassed of. While this desire may be understandable, it in no way has anything to do with reality. In the past, the illusion of privacy was easy to keep up, much like the belief in God and miracles. However, in the day and age of integrated computer systems, satellites orbiting with nanometre imaging, cameras everywhere and your life contained in your bank pin, the illusion is fading quickly.

Hogwash you say! Well I do say. Let’s look at privacy and what it requires. Put simply privacy requires that other people are inept. It relies on government agencies to not talk to each other (i.e. the guys that run the satellites, not talking to law enforcement, not talking to the courts, not talking to the meter-maid/man walking by your car which has 52 outstanding parking tickets on it).

The concept of privacy through ignorance is at an end. Every day dozens of spy satellites pass over your house and take pictures of you, everything in your house, everything you do, even the kinky sex with your husband and his buddy that you don’t want anyone to know about. Every day, the cameras that are used to protect you at the ATM are also taking pictures of every store that you window shop at including the dildo store on Younge St. in Toronto you just can’t help yourself from looking in (Is that place still there? We got a lot of laughs because of that store when I was at Ryerson!).

And on a more low-tech scale, your car has a licence plate, everyone if they cared could write down that licence number and know exactly where you are and keep track of that information. In fact the police have been using this since the advent of the licence plate to find out if you were at the scene of a crime. Every time you get into your car to go to the porn store, you’re relying on people not caring enough to bother to notice that you passed or that you were in the parking lot and that even if they did care, well they don’t care enough to tell your wife, or don’t know her.

Relying on other people’s laziness, stupidity, ignorance or ineptitude is a sure way to get burned. That in the past it took significantly more effort to put all of the information together only serves to make the point. It was easier for the people that held the information to be lazy than to put it all together with all of that leg work that was required. But make no mistake, some people would go to the effort and your privacy would be “breached” (if you think that privacy is something that is real) or more to the point, your delusion of privacy would come tumbling down around your ears and the consequences of reality would hit you over the head. This is the fundamental principle of law enforcement. Detectives look for the evidence that you left behind and find out exactly what you were doing and when. Now CSIs do a lot of that work because it requires highly specialized knowledge of DNA etc., but the result is the same and even more sure. And by the way, everywhere you go, you’re leaving evidence that you were there in the form of DNA. Someone just has to care enough to collect it and they will know everything you do.

As Ben Franklin said “Live your life as if you were in a glass house”. Everything you do, everything you say can be known by others and this is nothing new, it’s just easier now. The point is, live a non-contradictory life and act justly and you will never have anything to feel ashamed or embarrassed about and thus you won’t need the illusion of privacy.

Ok, so privacy doesn’t exist, but there is a bigger issue here. In the past, you could be relatively sure that the government was incompetent because it relies on bureaucrats that get paid regardless of if they do their jobs or not, and are almost impossible to fire. Now, computer systems put all of the information together without the lazy guy at the desk having anything to do with it. Is there anything wrong with that per say? No. The problem is that socialism gives government the power to do things with that information that violates freedom in the name of “the greater good” (see my previous blog entry). It gives the government the right to decide that polygamy is illegal and thus you cannot practice it even though all 50 of your wives agreed, or that sodomy is illegal and thus you can’t have sex with your wife in that naughty way you just love and your wife tolerates for some god forsaken reason. It means that the government can decide that speeding is bad and give you a ticket because of the GPS system in your car that allows you to know where you’re going, even though you didn’t harm anyone or even attempt to harm anyone, or that the government even has any information that even indirectly suggests that speed has anything to do with increased risk of accidents (see Montana if you need an example of the opposite) and thus didn’t break any just law.

The key to the fear of lack of privacy isn’t the lack of privacy, it is the underlying knowledge that the government has too much power and could at any time arbitrarily decide that what you do that affects no one else but you is now illegal and that you’ll get caught. The solution is to get back to freedom. Get back to the concept of if there is no involuntary physical harm, there is no violation of the law. We have to get back to the position that the government does not have the right to pass any tax that the individual paying the bill doesn’t use (User pay). If you use the highways, you pay gas tax to have the highways maintained and that tax goes only to maintaining the highways and nothing else. If you want to have Unemployment insurance you can go ahead and pay into it if you so choose and not otherwise. If you want government organized healthcare with public hospitals, you can choose to pay into that service as well. If you want to partake in private health care, you can do so if you so choose without fear of prosecution under the Medicare act.

The solution for the loss of perceived privacy, itself an illusion, is a government that cannot infringe on your freedom in any way shape or form. That cannot bill you for anything that you do not opt in directly for (just like your cable bill!), and cannot charge you for anything that does not physically harm another or that the other gave you permission to harm them (assisted suicide).

Again, freedom is the solution. Privacy is the obviscation. Embrace freedom, and forget the concept of privacy. It doesn’t exist and never has.

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