50 lines
2.7 KiB
Markdown
50 lines
2.7 KiB
Markdown
---
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date: 2014-05-15T00:00:00-05:00
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title: "Privacy as a Collective Good"
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tags: [free-software, en_us, english, thoughts, privacy, behavior]
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---
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It has been a while since I wanted to write about this subject. At many
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presentations that I gave during these last 2 years, I used the
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expression in the title in order to try to raise more awareness about
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why we should take care of our privacy (and maybe everyone's). But what
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does it really mean?
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First of all, this article is not a copy of Benjamin Mako's [Google Has
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Most of My Email Because It Has All of
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Yours](http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours).
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And I would also like to take this opportunity to recommend this great
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article; it provides many insights that some people do not even realize.
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But back to the point: privacy is a collective good, and we should
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preserve it. The explanation of why I am calling privacy something
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“collective” is simple, and if you read Ben's article you probably know
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it by now: whenever I send an e-mail to someone who uses Gmail, Google
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will have a copy of it, **even if I don't have a Google account**. What
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does it mean? It means that I pay my own server in order to run my own
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e-mail infrastructure and not have my privacy disrespected, but in the
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end of the day the majority of my efforts are useless. Which boils down
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to something that may be hard to read, but is true: **you are not
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respecting my privacy**. Your displicence with your privacy is forcing
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me, who needs to communicate with you, to give up my privacy as well,
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even if for a small portion of time. But it's not only about e-mail...
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Another common example is Facebook. I don't have an account there, and
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don't plan to have one, despite the pressure coming from the society
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sometimes. However, when you take a picture of me and post it there, or
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when you mention something about me on your Facebook, you are also
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disrespecting my privacy. If I don't have Facebook, it is because I do
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not want to become a product for them and have my personal data sold to
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advertisement companies, nor have it shared with the NSA. You, on the
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other hand, do not care about this, and post things about me and other
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people without their permission. This is wrong, and you are
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**disrespecting my privacy**.
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I chose to use this argument because oftentimes people are not concerned
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about their privacy, and think that “*if I have nothing to hide, then I
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don't need privacy*”. I won't even begin discussing this absurd, because
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that is not the point of this article. Instead, I noticed that sometimes
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people pay more attention if you say that they are disrespecting someone
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else's right. Maybe I am wrong, but I still think it is worth trying to
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open everyone's eyes for something that seems to have been forgotten by
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most.
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