“Ultimately, arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
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The intersection of technology and privacy is a topic that has interested me for decades. Recently, I half-jokingly told a friend that ever since I watched E.T. as a young child in the 1980s, I haven’t been able to trust our government. All jokes aside, I invite you to check out the new website that I’ve dedicated to the topic of privacy.
Since the COVID pandemic in 2020, many of us started asking difficult questions about the powerful leaders whom we previously trusted. Whether in government, technology, healthcare, or the corporate world, we witnessed totalitarianism unleashed upon the world’s population in astonishing ways. There have been many defenders of these post-COVID changes. “After all,” they say, “we’re just keeping you safe.”
The changes we witnessed during the COVID pandemic were more of an unmasking of government policy than anything new. The Patriot Act of 2001 legalized the government spying on its own citizens. Since then, it has been collecting huge swaths of data and keeping it indefinitely. Ten years later, the US government passed a bill that allows itself to arrest and detain citizens indefinitely, without any charges or hope for a trial (this is called kidnapping, by the way).
Why does this concern me? As an Orthodox Christian who enjoys studying history, I know that totalitarian governments eventually come for the church. They may not shut it down, but they tightly control it. If Christians step out of line with the government’s narrative, they find themselves in prison, a gulag, a concentration camp, or being executed. With the above mentioned laws in the US, it would be both easy and legal for the government to collect data about its citizens, figure out who is unhappy with the regime in power, and then remove those “pesky” people from society without any trial. While there has been no open persecution of Christians in the US, again, everything is in place that would enable an exceedingly corrupt government to quickly and legally make its moves.
By protecting our communications and privacy, we can at least decrease the amount of data that the government and corporations continually harvest on us. Without moving into a cave and living off the land, we’ll never be able to eliminate some level of surveillance, but we can reduce it. Hopefully, my articles on the above-linked site will help you understand why this is important and what we can do about it.
Real Danger vs. Hypothetical
Yet, I readily admit the fear of the government coming for us Christians in the US is purely hypothetical. What isn’t at all hypothetical, however, is the present danger of hackers who break into large, corporate systems, snatch the data they find there, and then post their findings to the dark web (you can keep up with that news here). In those dark corners of the internet, bad actors (both foreign and domestic) can access social security numbers, date of birth, medical history, email address, physical address, employment history, names of friends and family members, private messages, photos, shopping and browsing history, etc. This kind of data can obviously lead to identity theft, bank fraud, blackmail, etc.
If this sounds too crazy to be true, in 2024, Change Healthcare had a ransomware attack that impacted the records of as many as 190 million Americans. “I’ve never heard of them, so I can’t be one of the victims,” is what people think, but Change is one of several tech companies that help facilitate claims, payments, and the sharing of healthcare of information between doctors, offices, hospitals, and insurance companies. You don’t have to know who they are for them to have access to your information.
And that goes for much of the information that we share in the digital world. The more information we provide about ourselves, the more our data is harvested, collected, shared, and sold. Data mining a highly lucrative business. And even if your information isn’t sold, it sits in various databases – just waiting to be hacked by someone.
Fortunately, there are steps we can take to secure our data.