The One About Privacy

Let's rewind 25 years to the summer of 2001. The Internet exists, but it's a vastly different place from what we think of today. Most people spend most of their online time visiting various personal websites and blogs, shopping, or doing research. There were no big social-media sites; the nearest equivalent were small BBS's and PHP forums. More importantly, at that point cookies were used to record, at most, two things: Were you logged into the website, and did you have anything in your cart?

Websites, at that point in time, did not track anything you did on any other website. Hell, they didn't exactly track where you went on their own website. Your digital footprint consisted almost entirely of posts you chose to make on public websites. You could opt-out of giving anybody any information about yourself simply by choosing not to make a profile and not posting anything. You also didn't need a profile to look at websites that weren't set to "private." You could surf the Net all day, and only your ISP would know where you'd been--and they only bothered to check up on that if you'd committed crimes on the Internet and they needed to respond to a warrant.

In 2026, a lot has changed about what's being monitored when you use the Internet, and the short answer is: everything. Every single webpage you go to, everything you click on those webpages, how long you look at each one, what you buy or sell online, what kinds of videos you are more likely to watch, etc. It's all being recorded and shared to third-parties. Every second you spend doing something online is being shared with random corporations.

Worse: a lot of people, mostly corporate-sponsored politicians, want us to use our government ID to log in to the Internet. Your government name would be attached to every single thing you do online. This is horrifying if you have anything at all that you'd like to keep private, from porn-viewing habits to wholesome family vacation photos. Anything at all. Plus, everything your children do online will be connected either to your government ID or to their own. Saying something embarrassing online as nickelbacklovr98 is easily forgotten and buried with time. Saying something embarrassing online as John Q. Public can be easily found by searching for your government name, and then forget getting that job promotion twenty years later.

Yet for some reason, a lot of the people I've talked to about this don't see what's wrong. They've accepted the fascist talking point "If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear." Which is nonsense. I am not ashamed of the fact that I defecate; everybody poops. That doesn't mean I want other people to watch me doing it. Before the Internet, when you went out in public, there was a level of anonymity. Strangers didn't know who you were at the grocery store, or the book store, or (if you were into that) the adult-video store. You could pay in cash, the form of payment that still, today, does not have your name automatically attached to it.

These laws, which claim to protect children, are the equivalent of having a spy follow you around literally everywhere you go and take notes. "Subject went to Panera Bread and ordered this particular soup. Subject spent 9 minutes eating the soup. Subject paused on the way out to look at a beautiful woman walking in. Subject then drove to..." you get the picture. Nobody is being protected by this, least of all the children, whose every online activity can be linked to them both now and when they are adults.

Oh, and did you notice that you can't access most websites without having some kind of user profile and password anymore? This includes sites that used to let you view without logging in at all, like social media sites. Why? Because there's no money in letting anonymous people on your site, but there's a ton of money in selling your users' data to random companies.

Instead of doing the digital equivalent of video-recording every time you poop, we need to have laws that guarantee a level of digital privacy. We can't just keep counting on the EU to do the right thing (which it also doesn't always do; a lot of EU countries have jumped on the ID-everyone bandwagon). The United States, Canada, hell, every country needs digital privacy laws, and we need them NOW.