What does ‘Privacy’ exactly mean to you, and is there anything left for us in cyberspace?
‘Privacy’, ain’t mean anything to you? Actually you are lucky if you are young enough to accept that Cyberspace is an integral part of our living (perhaps you might even believe it is the main part of living!), but imagine one day you wake up and you are part of the Cyberspace with old definition of Privacy”, then you would be shocked and even paranoid about private aspects of your life, I bet you already are!
Privacy does not have the same definition, or expectations of 50 years ago, or even 10 years ago. That type of privacy does not exist within boundary of the Net, it simply does not apply to cyberspace anymore and the main driver for that is the way internet applications are setup and utilized, which force us to forget about privacy otherwise we won’t get the expected experience of the Net Applications.
Today’s Privacy means adversaries shouldn’t be able to get into your private life, otherwise all Net application providers have and supposed to have access to most private part of your life. They require you to disclose as much as possible or either you would be denied completely, or you won’t get particular key services of an online application. Note that you cannot necessary blame software in this case, as applications are where the limitation to privacy natively appears. An example is any web software which takes care of your filing taxes, or credit score… the application requires you to disclose ALL information to software, otherwise there is no value to application when any piece is missing, so you have to trust and maximize disclosure.
How you are going to talk about privacy when they know you more than yourself!
Privacy is simply collective and relative, there is no absolute unless you decide not to have any online presence, which is impossible because at least your bank knows about you and their systems are online. Privacy is collective but not selective, means some people know you better than yourself and some SHOULD NOT (doesn’t mean that they DO NOT!) but you cannot select who is doing what with your data out there, unless totally being departed and detached from society!
Privacy nowadays is the state of being only worried about adversaries, hackers and criminals, but not concerned about how application providers are with our your information. remember, even with regulation like GDPR, we ‘may’ be able to reduce exposure of our data, but we never able to erase information about ourselves, we perhaps can ask a data processor to forget about our data inside a database (assuming data never got into hands of bad guys) but we cannot ask them to forget about intelligence behind our data.
An example is when the intelligence of how you shop and what you shop is created within “cloudy sky of numerous Net applications“, no matter if you personally delete every single record of your shopping transactions within a website. So relax and change your definition of Privacy, you also may want to totally ignore VPN and anonymous web browsing which I will explain later Why you usually do not need them.