Privacy Is A Commons
What is a Commons?
A resource shared by all that is the responsibility of all, like a city or national park. Commons can be very difficult things to maintain, especially when the responsibility to contribute isn’t clearly defined. The value is worth the effort.
The easy example of a Commons is a city park. Anyone can use it, it’s paid for by taxes, and it offers far more value than any individual can usually contribute. By each contributing a tiny bit of value through taxes or effort, we work together to build a valuable resource.
While a city park is an example of a Commons that requires relatively little maintenance and the responsibility for that maintenance is clear, Privacy is a different sort of Commons all together.
What Makes Privacy Different?
In order for any one of us to simply have the ability to be private, we must all be generally private in our day to day lives. It’s a huge responsibility, and not enough of us are doing it to make it work.
I was first exposed to this idea of being responsible for being private from Phil Zimmerman, the guy who invented easy-to-use cryptography for anyone in the form of PGP.
The basic idea of everyone needing to be private is that if you are the only one using some kind of privacy shield, you stand out. As with anything, once someone is aware that you’re different you attract attention and resources to figure out why you’re different.
Nothing to Hide?
For many people, including me, we don’t feel like we have anything to hide. While there are some basic things to hide like passwords, PINS, notes to your spouse, we feel like none of those are particularly embarrassing if they were exposed, just that they would cause us a hassle if they were public knowledge.
Wait, Maybe You Do Want Privacy.
What if one day you decide that you want to share a secret with a friend and you don’t want Google, or Facebook, or your email provider to have access to your secret? If you suddenly start trying to hide a specific message, that makes it easy for anyone looking for valuable stuff to assume that in your hidden message is something of value.
Obviously, no encryption is perfect, but by making it very difficult to figure out which messages to attack, and then making it difficult to attack specific messages, we all are guaranteed a much higher rate of privacy than if we only hide the important stuff.
That’s why wherever possible you should seek to be private. Your attempts at privacy don’t have to be perfect. Even when they just include the basics, your efforts protect not just your data stream but everyone’s data.
How? By adding a cacophony of privacy into the marketplace, the noise produced makes finding the signals much more difficult.
That’s why Privacy is a Commons. It doesn’t work very well until we all start contributing our little bit.
The challenge of privacy for all through small contributions from all is the difficulty for any one of us to actually be held accountable for our privacy. Just as it’s pretty easy for individuals to litter in a park and not get caught, it’s easy for many people to never take on the mantle of responsibility that mass privacy requires.
I’m Not A Conspiracy Minded Person
You may read this and think I’m a little more conspiracy minded than your “normal” friends. Trust me, I’m not. I don’t do aliens or Area 51 or New World Order. I sell cookies online, like to run and fly in the mountains, enjoy conversations about anything weird, and spend lots of time with my wife, dogs, and other good friends. You may be different and a Bilderburg theorist, that’s fine with me. Hell, I’d love to chat with you about it, I’m always curious!
Still, the people I want to reach and convince are folks like me. Regular people who deserve and are responsible for a reasonable amount of privacy in their daily lives.
How Can You Be More Private?
Ok, so you’re a regular person and you understand that you have this new responsibility you didn’t know about. How do you make yourself more private? The first and easiest way is to use a VPN, or Virtual Private Network. It’s not perfect, it’s not the be-all end-all, but if everyone ran one of these the world would be a much more private place.
How do you get one? I use Golden Frog’s VYPERVPN, which is an app you can put on your phone and computers that protects you when you connect to the internet. It’s really easy and cheap. I don’t make any money from recommending them, I’ve just found them to be super easy and recommended by people I trust.
Going Beyond A VPN.
How else can you up your privacy? I’m hoping that some of the folks on this Steemit platform can chime in and make recommendations for normal people. I’m not looking for NSA level encryption in every part of my life, I just want it so the “walls of my digital house” aren’t made of glass. Any recommendations?
Thanks so much for reading through this, hopefully this idea of Privacy being not just a right but a responsibility and a Commons will spread throughout the ‘net.
Cheers!
Nik @ PT
*Phil Zimmerman Podcast On Privacy & PGP