What Does Privacy Mean?

“Privacy” is not a new buzzword, but it should be the most scrutinized buzzword in every industry. Whenever a new service, site, or app launches—especially when the words “private” or “privacy” are used—I check the privacy policy. What I find is often truly awful. Data collection, retention, and sharing. Go check one yourself. Companies will often claim they’re “not in the business” of selling your information (even in the privacy policy itself). But then they will say they use your personal information for “corporate events” (why?) and that they’ll share it with their service providers. You didn’t make an agreement with their service providers, so who knows what they’ll do with it. I think it’s really worth asking whether the free-for-now-but-pay-for-it-later model—so frequently used by Silicon Valley startups—is really worth the cost of your personal and private information. And it’s worth a follow-up question of whether the information you provide is solely your own anyway. Your friends’ contact information? That’s not yours to share. I’m worried that we are doomed to suffer the same consequences, over and over, forever. Each of us that gives up our information in exchange for services that we undoubtedly later are required to pay for—due to a decade-long bait-and-switch—have no real recourse. We have no way to recover the information once we’ve given it up, especially if it makes its way to third parties, whether or not a company “sells” it or not. Calling any of that “private” is wrong. It’s private only in that it’s not public. But this is not binary, and there are more open doors than closed ones in many privacy policies. I once signed up for every new thing, but in the last 10 years, I find myself rejecting every transaction of my data for access to the service. In almost every situation, I’d much rather not use it at all.