Banishing the Digital Thieves
We are used to trading a bit of our data for free services. If you’re not the customer, you’re the product, as the saying goes. Increasingly, even when we pay for products, our data often gets collected and monetized. Trading data for a free service seems fair. When you’re paying for a product, I would argue that data extraction is tantamount to thievery.
I am on a journey to banish these thieves from my life, starting within my home. I started with my doorbell camera. Next up on my hitlist is my home network hardware. While Google Wifi has been rock solid, I imagine there are mountains of telemetry and app data are being siphoned off behind my back. For most users, the best option is to buy an off-the-shelf product from a supplier more committed to privacy. I took the more adventurous route of replacing the Google software on these devices with the open source OpenWRT platform. This is not for the faint of heart. But have you really lived without flashing firmware?
The right to privacy is core to a free and democratic society. The U.S. is founded upon laws that guarantee privacy rights within society at large. Those rights grow even more powerful when protecting privacy within the home. It isn’t so easy to enforce these rights these days. Privacy at home is complex in the digital age. While fences and shutters keep out prying eyes in the physical world, our digital home life is much harder to conceal.
A common counterargument to the criticism of pervasive digital surveillance is that if you have nothing to hide then you shouldn’t be concerned. I disagree, but I won’t take on that argument today. Let’s instead attack privacy invasion from a different angle.
The U.S.’s democracy is built on privacy rights. But that’s not the only pillar holding up our society, both our governance and capitalism are also built on a foundation of private property ownership. Extracting people’s valuable data without compensation is property theft. If you don’t want your property stolen out from under you, take data privacy seriously. There is a massive industry thriving by taking what is rightfully yours, with no compensation. You may have nothing to hide, but I doubt you enjoy being robbed.
