A brief explainer of opposition to consumer privacy options.
Individuals are in a marketplace conflict to administrate terms of their own privacy.
Oftentimes, as personal privacy practitioners we feel underserved as a market and (sometimes) assaulted by offerings on the end-use table. For instance, we will buy phones, laptops and gadgets. We are simultaneously mindful of the security problems they come with. We have used and invested in technology our whole lives. We don’t live in the woods, off grid for months at a time, competing with the bears for Salmon runs. We want options. We will pay for them because we are up against adversaries who gamble on our technology dependency.
So have you observed the portrait of the assertive consumer? The privacy conscious consumer’s cameo appears in this drama as the justified self-defender. This represents the household who acquires a shotgun to deter home invasions, staving off harm to property and family. They will adopt encryption and increasingly better security for all family devices. They reach for the opt-out from biometrics in school lunch lines. They also will educate family members on digital rights, issues of consent and mindfulness of apparent threats. If they are compromised, they follow up in the court system. They get legal help. They file police reports and consumer complaints with the AG and the FTC. What they don't do is flagg, throw their hands in the air and take bad advice from people who don't have to live with their consequences. They control damages.
Just like every other conflict, in user privacy conflicts you have to identify and respect the ability of your opponents. Sometimes your opponents are only situational. They have one goal in mind: win in the moment. In other cases, your opponents are predatory. They want to deleverage your rights so they have unlimited access and power over even the smallest of your affairs in perpetuity.
There is a dichotomy of needs based on basic information security. For instance, governments grant immunities to purveyors of mass surveillance and penetration intelligence services. Then they “lawfully” hack: critics, journalists, and hecklers, anyone who bears opposition. They also need critical information security guardianship to keep operating normally. So they are also privacy market buyers.
There are days governments can’t finish what they start when it comes to political, legal or physical limitations. When they can't protect themselves or others from the kinds of aggressions they commit public resources to. This leaves normal people cut adrift into a space where they enjoy neither rights nor protections.
Governments believe they reserve the right to commit themselves and others to acts of aggression. Governments may opt for war strategy that has range of any means that Wikipedia has under the ‘War’ stub. Your computing rights and economy amid undeclared cyber conflicts become collateral damage. You also become their opponent when you defend yourself as they choose a clandestine option.
You won't necessarily know who the enemy is when they choose you. Nonetheless, if anyone chooses to illegally pilfer your social media, your employer or your home networks, you owe your household your best efforts to maintain security.
So, who else is marginalized by the consumer market for Privacy-as-a-Defense?
First, hackers whose potential should not be underestimated. These are your garden variety range: script kiddies in their mom’s basement, black market hackers-for-hire and Black Hat cyber spooks for hire. When they ‘go corporate’ they become White Hat penetration testers. There are also other hats out there Red hats, Blue hats and Brown hats based on the roles they play for hire as information security administration. What about the ideologues and corporations who hire them?
People with strategic intelligence interests defer to the information services of data brokers. Information brokers wear different masks: behavioural market engineers, Big Data aggregates and even media conglomerates, like Reuters. Whomever they are, your privacy rights have never been a necessary consideration to do business. Privacy rights may be a problem to be overcome to them.
They have brought a conflict to consumer PET producers because they believe that you must lose privacy in order for them to win. Many are global governance policy lobbies, global business elitists and most are technocrats. They don’t care about your consent or if it's fair.
They want containment of the new consumer market for privacy-based services. They will tell any privacy tech company producer in an instant: you have already lost, privacy is over and whatever you are, is now their property. They will survey your prospects and try to poison commercial access to market conventions which don’t serve them. They will get a foreign government to run intelligence on your company for them and on your patent activity. They will hack your lawyers and your wife’s handset. They will buy up the resources you have set aside in preclusive purchasing to drive up the price to shift demand.
They believe you owe them; which is incorrect thinking. The consumer and the employee are both reduced to cascading spreadsheets. Their interactive relationship to you is about how to get you to populate the anthills they create called ‘social media’ so they can reorganize and resell…you. Some of them lose sleep at night unless individual right to privacy is failing in public policy and the market. They fear losing power and ill-gotten gain.
They don’t want you to know who they are. You might show up to inform them that you are the rightful owner of the information they have been licensing without your consent. Legally they must comply, but they will fight you. Your opponents may be ruthless and crazy; which is why you must approach this with sober eye to common law and grounded principles. Those who have defected from their information economy become the enemy.
Of all the aggressors the privacy consumer faces, the data broker is the one to beat. Their kryptonite is action to physically or legally deny them the data they demand to take to market. That is why when you adopt a privacy enhancing applications you have become a brand abolitionist, funnelling slaves away from the people who use them for uninterrupted intelligence and profit.
The Secret Lives of PETs
If PET (Privacy Enhancing Technology) developers knows the type of people they are up against, they are likely to respect the dangers of doing business casually. The PET Industry needs to organize. Perhaps they will safeguard their business associates with respective OpSec training. They need new marketing strategies, strategic partnerships and friends who are invested in the long term win for privacy innovation. They need to collaborate with counter surveillance and anti-surveillance pros to be able to adapt to threats.
Businesses need privacy. Consumers need privacy. Governments need privacy. People on their own side need privacy. PET adoption has to be as pervasive as social engineering campaigns and they don’t have 20 years to wait behind suppression campaigns driven by data brokering competitors. The world needs privacy now.
Privacy consumers need entrepeneurs to promote and evangelize adoption of PETs and security tools as a brand of Peace Of Mind. So they need VCs and consumer preference campaigns. They need governments to stop legislating against consumer choice of privacy. So consumer and business interests lobbying and lawyering teams need to be assembled to represent the interests of PETs self-determination.
Demand is up. People aren’t going to get privacy from the people scheming to take it from them. So who is in a position to deliver PETs to the market unimpeded?
PET developers and entrepeneurs. Go to these wells to draw up tools and resources to protect your interests against random acts of hostility.
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:
"The apathy of some is not an adequate substitute for the consent of all."
-Sheila Dean