Our Lives Exposed

At work I am doing research about how to be anonymous online. Basically I have found out that it is impossible to hide your identity on the Internet – all you can really do is make it more difficult for people to track you. Needless to say, I wasn’t comforted.

I was researching in the context of human rights workers abroad who want to blog online without getting arrested by oppressive regimes. But what about average citizens in democratic countries? I learned that Google has a horrible privacy reputation in part because its ad system scrolls all your email, pulling out key words to show you ads related to your email. Also, I learned that all email (not just Gmail) is never really gone. You can delete it, but you can’t annihilate it. It lives somewhere else. It’s like your email has Horcruxes (for those Harry Potter fans).

And it’s not just email. Any nosy person out there can find out where I am blogging from, what websites I visit, and even intercept my online communications without me knowing. And yes, I can take precautions, but they aren’t absolute. No matter what, the government could summons my personal online diary or a clever hacker could find a loophole.

Alright, so nothing is private online. But nothing is every completely private offline either. If I write love letters to someone, I bet someone in the postal service, or even a snoop going through my mailbox could wind up reading them without much trouble. If I write a journal, it could be confiscated as evidence if I am ever accused of a crime.

Someone could argue that if you have nothing to hide then it doesn’t much matter whether your personal emails or diaries are read. That’s not the point. The fact that I know that Gmail is reading my email to choose ads and cooperates with the government when required makes me less inclined to write personal, controversial things. The fact that one day government worker X could read my deepest thoughts in my diary makes me not want to write a diary at all.

Of course, I would not advocate for the protection of personal records when it comes to an attempt to convict criminals, so I guess I make no sense and am completely confused on the matter of privacy. It just came as a shock to me that nothing – NOTHING – is ever 100% private and I am not sure how to deal with it.