“That the individual enjoy full protection of his person and his property is a principle as old as common law; but it has been found necessary from time to time to have to redefine the exact nature and scope of such protection.” —Samuel Warren and Louis D. Brandeis (1890), “The Right to Privacy”, Harvard Law Review
As society evolves, so do the needs that constitute the public good. Thousands of years ago, these needs used to be limited to the provision of a small group of people, and in modern times, people’s needs may have nothing in common with those of those ancestors.
The evolution of technology in particular, often generates debates about privacy, since with the new ways in which information travels and the new mechanisms by which it can be obtained, new ways of collecting and disclosing personal information also arise.
The rapid evolution of technology has outpaced society’s understanding of the need for privacy: in 1890, when the first portable cameras began to be sold on the market and the first privacy treatise was written in the United States, the main concern was the collection and dissemination of photographs of people. Now, people carelessly spread personal photos on platforms like Facebook and Instagram (not that there’s anything wrong with sharing photos).
But along with the now innocuous sharing of images comes a more covert movement of personal data. Big tech platforms want more than just your face. They want your workplace, your location, your age, your personal contact information, your interests and hobbies; in short, they want to know almost everything about you. And that information, while not all of it is shared publicly, represents a far greater income to personal privacy than the rise of photography.
These data collection companies have built an empire of collection and analysis, sales and targeted advertising, in a relatively short period of time. People are still catching up, and most are still unfamiliar with how their data is used and how much.
Technological advancement has outpaced the evolution of privacy care, and this has arguably been the case for the last time. It is in no way limited to Web2’s collection of data from big tech companies:
Between 1952 and 1973, the CIA “examined” 28 million letters addressed to the Soviet Union and China and opened 215,000. A huge database of metadata on phone calls and text messages collected from US phone carriers was made public in 2006. The UK Government Communications Headquarters and the US NSA collect more than 800,000 financial transactions, 200,000,000 messages of text, extrapolated information on 1,600,000 border crossings, and more every day in a database called DISHFIRE, which, by the way, allows the UK government to access information that its own laws prohibit, because it is collected by the NSA and thus “foreign intelligence”. According to Edward Snowden, while at the NSA, he could “tap into anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if you had a personal email.”
The growth of cryptography (and the historic and ongoing efforts by authoritarian governments to subvert it) suggests the importance of privacy to both individualism and dissent. It is for these reasons that privacy is crucial to any evolving society: a society that stops dissenting will stop evolving.
The time has come
The time has come to “redefine the exact nature and scope of such protection,” as Warren and Brandeis put it some 130 years ago.
What does this mean? It means that with the advent of crypto social networks or crypto social as we have called it at Status Network, we have a perfect opportunity to decide what the privacy standards will be for the social networks of the future. And because Web3’s social networks will be governed by code, rather than by corporations, there will be no avenue to exploit user privacy for profit.
Because crypto social media will allow users to selectively disclose their information, rather than being completely and permanently doxed, people will be able to use the internet, social media, and DeFi with the same level of comfort and privacy that they have at home.
For us to evolve, privacy must also evolve. Crypto social represents a significant step in the evolution of privacy, setting new standards that the next generation of tech pioneers may one day consider old-fashioned. But for now, crypto social offers a way to take back your privacy that we lost in Web2 and keep it in Web3.
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