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I'm not doing anything wrong, let them watch: explaining why you should care about your technological privacy

-- By MalcolmEvans - 22 Mar 2017

If you already take your technological privacy seriously, this paper isn’t for you. However, if when reading about thinks such as the Snowden leaks, NSA spying, wiretapping (whether real or not), you’re initially alarmed, but then eventually tell yourself something along the lines of “it’s definitely an invasion of privacy, but I’m not doing anything wrong, so I have no reason to worry,” then I’m writing this paper directly for you. I used to be you. When people suggested I let go of things like my iPhone and Gmail for the sake of enhanced security I scoffed at the thought of my hindered productivity from the byproduct of using “inferior” products that were far less convenient Yet, slowly but surely I came to realize that even if I wasn’t doing anything wrong, I needed to take steps to protect my privacy; I’m nowhere close to leading the charge, but I’m getting nearer, and here’s my case to you to join me.

The Technical

The first hump to more privacy is getting over the fear of technology. Unfortunately, because the majority of Americans are deeply ingrained with the mindset of consumers, we learn to interact with products, and not how they are created. Overtime, this unawareness of how what we use operates solidifies into a seemingly unclimbable wall of information.; so unscalable that we lose hope of ever seeing the side of enlightenment. But this shouldn’t be the case for several reasons.

The Ease

Increasing your privacy is easier than you think. Part of you may have an aversion for doing so because of the assumption that increasing privacy requires being a computer wizard or completely overhauling their entire life, neither of which is true. In fact, there are many step-by-step tutorials that will walk you through things such as sending encrypted emails that which will protect the email’s content from being read by other entities than the intended recipients, and proxying your web traffic which makes it difficult for others around you (like in coffee shops) to view your web traffic, and can allow you to mix your traffic with others, which in turn will make it harder to isolate your specific activity.

The reality is that almost all things you can do to increase your privacy are simply an exist somewhere in a tutorial format that assumes little to no prior technical knowledge/skills. I intentionally used the word “searchable” instead of “Googlable” because Google is not your friend when it comes to privacy because their business model is heavily centered on collecting information about your activities, including your browsing activities, and using this as a foundation for their advertising revenue model.

Section II

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Section II

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