In a series of 21 posts on this blog, we'll examine how privacy rights \u2014 essential civil liberties \u2014 have been completely lost in the transition to digital. The erosion is nothing short of catastrophic.<\/p>\n
In a series of posts on this blog, we will take a look at all the different areas, where privacy has simply vanished in the transition to digital, and where it ended up instead. For each of the policy areas, we'll take a look at where different jurisdictions stand and where the trends are pulling. The key takeaway is clear \u2014 it's not the slightest bit unreasonable that our children should have at least the same set of civil liberties and our parents, and today, they don't. They don't at all.<\/p>\n
To kick off, we'll be looking at the liberties around the analog letter<\/em>, and how many liberties around it \u2014 such as the taken-for-granted right to send an anonymous letter \u2014 has been completely lost. Same thing with anonymous public posters on billboards; who defends your right to make an anonymous political statement today?<\/p>\n We\u2019ll be looking at how you no longer have the right to walk about in private, without somebody tracking you. It used to be a thing that airports and train stations were safe anonymous places for our parents; today, your phone is a realtime tracking beacon as soon as you approach them.<\/p>\n Further, we\u2019ll take a look at how it used to be that authorities would need to catch you in the act doing something they didn\u2019t like, but are now capable of rewinding the records<\/em> 20 years or so to find something they missed<\/em> when it happened, and maybe didn\u2019t even care about then, perhaps something you didn\u2019t even pay attention to at the time either, and much less remember 20 years later.<\/p>\n Our parents went to libraries and searched for information. The librarians went to extreme lengths, even inventing the warrant canary<\/em>, to make sure people could search for whatever information they wanted and read whatever books they wanted without authorities knowing about it. Today, Google goes to the same extreme lengths, but to make note of everything you search for, up until and including what you almost<\/em> search for but didn\u2019t<\/em> \u2014 and of course, all of it is available to authorities and governments, who only have to tell Google to follow the law they just wrote.<\/p>\n It is not the slightest bit unreasonable to demand that our children should have at least as much civil liberties \u2014 privacy rights \u2014 in their digital environment, as our parents had in their analog environment. Yet, the privacy rights have been almost abolished in the transition to digital.<\/strong><\/p>\n Speaking of reading, our parents could buy a newspaper on the corner with some change. They would read a newspaper without anybody neither knowing that they bought or read it. As opposed to our children, where it is carefully logged which newspapers they read, when, what articles, in what order, and for how long \u2013 and perhaps worst, what action they took right afterward, and whether it looked caused by reading the last article they read.<\/p>\n