The Privacy-Sharing Deal with the Devil

tl;dr: Every data, billions of people trade their data for access. It’s too bad they don’t know what they are really getting…an increased risk of exploitation.

Advocates of privacy will often lament about how readily and quickly people are willing to trade their personal information for free stuff.

In Kevin Kelley’s fantastic book, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, there is a quote that many people have highlighted:

**“If today’s social media has taught us anything about ourselves as a species, it is that the human impulse to share overwhelms the human impulse for privacy.” **

I’ve been speculating for a while now (even before Cambridge Analytica) that it would be privacy that got was the entry point to mainstream blockchain-ification. It still may be.

All of this came to mind because I recently installed an extension in my Chrome browser called Ghostery. It will show you, at any given site, just how many trackers are in place.

I don’t remember which site this was, but it’s pretty representative of those that you most likely visit.

Now, as a former VP/Marketing, I know how valuable this information is, how it can and is used, and I have seen plenty of other organizations misuse and violate private information on a regular basis.

After visiting just this one site, 17 different databases were updated with my information. Start combining all of this information with IP addresses, browser history, and much more and, pretty soon, everything about you can be known.

Since the early days of the commercial Internet (I got my first email account in 1991) and social media (blogging since 2000, LinkedIn member in the 186,000 range and so on), I have been a huge advocate of digital, connective technology.

I still am.

At the same time, the tracking technology makes the likelihood of a Black Mirror-esque “Shut Up and Dance” episode all the more likely. Data blackmail and extortion become increasingly likely and more embarrassing.

Even if you didn’t do it, there’s a societal cost to pay.

The other day, a family remember received an email with her username and password saying from a scammer saying that he had evidence that she watched porn (even though she didn’t) and that the scammer would email all her friends with the damming information. (Naturally, the scammer demanded Bitcoin- which pissed me off, but different topic).

What the scammer had done was either hacked a site (like an Equifax) or bought a list off the dark web. From there, he obtained a list of stolen user names, passwords, and email addresses. Then sent a mass email to all of them. All he needed was a small number to pay up (odds are, if you email 1000 people about their porn viewing habits, you are going to get some people who have watched porn on their computers).

It was a brilliant social engineering attack, meant to hit at people’s natural, understandable desire to avoid shame and public embarrassment.

Until identity and personal information truly becomes self-sovereign (meaning you keep control of it at all times), we are going to see more and more of these things happen at the individual and national level, Facebook’s promises notwithstanding.

This is why projects like PeerMountain (discl: advisor), Sovrin, NuID, and others are so important and why the decentralized web relies on tools like MetaMask for log-in as opposed to usernames and passwords.

For now, however, it’s important to recognize that our natural desire to share with others is actually making us more and more vulnerable to shame.

It’s a fascinating evolutionary twist.