Do We Deserve Data Privacy?
By: Barrett Rothe
Tags: Human Rights, Business, Politics, Data Privacy, Privacy

Right now the discussions on intrusive data practices are failing to ask an important question: to what degree do we even deserve data privacy?

Ask any internet crusader and they will tell you that companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook are compiling unprecedented amounts of data on their users. A lot of that data is kept and used in-house as the means to better market to their own customer base. In the case of the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook data got out of its cage and changed the world.

Our user data is a powerful force to be sure, but it’s a power we hand over to private companies in the course of voluntarily using their apps. The debate of how to ensure data privacy seems to skip over the notion that we are not actually compelled to use mobile apps, websites, or the digital assistants that listen into our lives. We choose to use those things. Our fear of intrusion on our data privacy ignores our very real power to delete Facebook from our phones, to order takeout the old-fashioned way, or use Firefox instead of Chrome.

By turning around and demanding a new right to data privacy we are treating companies like Facebook as if they are the post office: a public entity that owes us protections, as if they are a public service and not the for-profit enterprises they actually are.

Photo by Rahul Chakraborty on Unsplash

These are services we choose to use of our own freewill. We do not need social media profiles, next day delivery, and the ability to tell Alexa to play Tom Petty while we workout, at least not in the same way we need food and water. But the average, even reasonable, person has made the dramatic leap from not having any of those things a decade ago to expecting that these new technologies fully oblige our addiction, and on our terms, today. When we start the privacy conversation from the paradigm that these products are basic necessities, those discussions will always fall apart at first contact with reality.

Data privacy, as articulated by most users, is a right. Basic necessities require rights, but products require consumer protections. Those are very different things under the law. Rights are enshrined and universal, consumer protections move with the times. And the rhetoric on the issue is only veering further from the question of necessity and rights vs. product and protections.

The CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, recently declared that data privacy should be considered a human right. That statement is the reigning apex predator hunting data privacy offenders. But just the term “human rights” should not be thrown around so casually. “Human rights” is a term usually reserved for the most fundamental protections for human existence. Let’s look to one source, the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for what usually rises to the level of being considered a human right.

The Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) has thirty articles. A sample of what might be considered a human right from the declaration includes the right to not be enslaved, the right to own property, the right to not be tortured, and the right to an education. Things most of the world’s authorities, public and private, are very comfortable with — even across cultures.

When we think of human rights violations we think of humanitarian crises, political refugees, and extrajudicial punishments… to name a few. You would be hard-pressed to make the argument that Doordash sending your location to a data collection firm and that firm in turn using the data to send you furniture ads is on the same moral plane of existence as those trying to flee hunger and political violence in Venezuala, for instance.

Eleanor Roosevelt with the Spanish version of the UDHR, November 1949. Source: WikiCommons.

To equate potential infringements of data privacy to a violation of human rights has the effect of catapulting the otherwise very real importance of data privacy into the realm of hyperbole, while simultaneously diminishing the life-and-death consequences of actual human rights violations.

A key principle of human rights is that you cannot be unduly harmed through no fault of your own. You do not choose your place of birth, your system of government, your fleeting rights under local statutes; human rights are meant to address the question of how should those who are blameless under the law be treated in this world. You do not have to download and use the Facebook app on your phone, but you do fundamentally need protection from your government arbitrarily detaining and torturing you.

It’s not that data privacy is not deserved and important. It is. Perhaps the most critical piece of the importance is that companies are not compelled to be forthright and transparent with their customers about what data are collected on them and where it goes. Fraud and abuse of customers is completely within the bounds of being regulated and punished, and most nations do so.

However, imagine for a moment that you frequent a local restaurant. You are a reliable, repeat customer for the restaurant. If you discovered on your twentieth visit that the restaurant tracked what time you usually came in, what you ordered, and who you were with… you would rightfully be a little creeped out. It’s not something you expected to happen nor were you informed ahead of time. Your reaction would, in this case, reasonably be to not continue eating at the restaurant. It would be a little unreasonable to suggest your human rights were being trampled upon.

Fast-forward to the same thing happening within the Amazon app on your phone. Why not stop using the app? Are you entitled to use the app? Was your ability to eat at the restaurant predicated on a right to privacy? A right to privacy even from the private business you were patroning? No. So how would you graft the right to privacy onto a private mobile app?

Photo by William Hook on Unsplash

The remedy for data privacy has to come in two parts: transparency from companies and self-reflection from users. Companies that collect and profit from your data on a massive, unprecedented scale in human history ought to be held to a legal and ethical standard that protects consumers. The best way to do this is full transparency about what they are collecting on you, where it goes, and severe penalties for violations, things we do not yet have under the law.

But we must also ask ourselves from where do we summon the idea that we are entitled to use a private enterprise? Is part of the solution to our modern data problems to return to a simpler time? To not create a right to use for-profit technology on the basis of public good.

As consumers we deserve transparency, but not complete anonymity from our own choices. We have a long way to go for an acceptable solution to private use of our personal data, but it’s not a one-way road built only for the companies we patron.