Over time I’ve heard a lot of pushback to the idea that you need to protect your personal information and privacy, “I don’t mind personalised ads”, “so what if they have it, they’re not going to do anything with it”, etc. To those people (and for my own entertainment and enjoyment) I present this (admittedly probably not unique) argument.

Imagine the government had access to everything about you. What you wrote, what you watched, what you said, what you questioned, what you believed, what you thought you understood, and more. Now, assuming you live in a half decent democracy, you probably have some control over what happens to this information, government can’t share it, can’t do much with it, can’t leak it, so on. Most people would say this isn’t great. They would call it authoritarian, totalitarian, distopian and other buzzwords for bad governments. Now imagine this scenario, but this information is held by a random person, all you know about them is their name, they have all the same information, but you have no control over them, they are not beholden to you through any means, they can do what they wish with the data. All that’s limiting them is a slap on the wrist from someone you picked out, whenever they do something wrong.

This is basically what is happening, right now.

While some would argue that this is a strawmaned version of the system in place, I maintain that you can still clearly see the inherent problem, authoritarian organisations having near complete control over the entire populations personal information. This is why people say don’t tell corporations your real birth date, don’t tell them your name, and why we get so worried when Facebook starts forcing people to put in their real name.

You wouldn’t get into a white van, don’t sign up for Facebook.

Thanks for reading.