Nothing to hide? Not the point.

When people like Mark Zuckerberg say privacy is dead, this suits the needs of his business. Cynics agree, and they simply give up. The science fiction novel by Dave Eggers “The Circle” imagines this capitulation: The world giving in to the tyranny of a fictional Silicon Valley company, a cross of Google and Facebook, that drives a ruthless transparency and reduces governments and people to near slaves in a hopeless future steered by others. This kind of narrative feeds the overly cautious people, those who deny all cookies, don’t say “Alexa” out loud or won’t even engage with the internet. 

But we don’t need to live in fear, and we also don’t need to believe that social media and other digital companies grow best where there are no rules. Beyond the careless, the cynics and the cautious we can find the pragmatic, careful users. They understand the trade-offs of sharing their data and take responsibility for their own privacy, including joining the discussions about public policy to best protect it.

Here, as well, attitudes vary. Different legal traditions, each informed by the history in which they emerged, mean countries are taking this topic from various starting points. Even though the word “private” goes back to Roman perceptions of the public and private sphere, the view shared by most modern democracies can be summed up in the pragmatic formulation from the US in the 19th century: “the right to be left alone”. This means free from interference from any outside interest, from governments to companies.

Simple, but nonetheless lived differently. Countries which once experienced authoritarian regimes that spied on every aspect of people’s lives tend to have very strong structures of personal data protection today. Germany, for example, takes this very seriously, as its history has been informed by two of the darkest episodes of state-sponsored violations of privacy, the Nazi regime and the German Democratic Republic in former East Germany. 

On the other hand, the US, which traditionally encourages business through lax regulations, has taken longer to become convinced of the need for greater data protection. There, too, the tide is turning dramatically, even with the change of administration. By now many states have enacted sweeping privacy laws or are about to, and the public discussion of banning TikTok in the US arose from concern about the information it gathers.

Authoritarian regimes simply don’t allow this discussion and in fact demand that companies share user data with the state. They will often equate privacy with mistrust, keeping secrets or egotism. A good citizen has nothing to hide. Familiar words. Whole bookshelves are also filled with philosophical discussions from every political direction of whether privacy is culturally specific and thus somehow trivial and in fact sometimes even dangerous. After all, domestic abusers also like to claim that what goes on in their home is private.

These are all extreme views disguised as simple fixes. Matters such as our health, love lives, political views, financial situation and even what we did on vacation are private, full stop. We can choose to share those, but we should never be tricked into it or forced into it. We have seen too often, long before social media, how this information is used and exploited, from simply annoying advertising to exposing people to bullying and worse. Today, we are especially plagued by the polarization driven by algorithms that envelop us in echo chambers of extreme content and conspiracies.

From TikTok to Facebook, we love these platforms because we can share with each other and even get offered content and products we like. We also understand that sometimes for the security of our society, authorities need some permission to track down real criminal behavior through the internet. Also, to train AI it will become important to share more personal information in order for it to function properly and help us make better decisions. Therefore, capturing these benefits lies somewhere in the middle between total exposure – whatever the motives behind it – and total withdrawal, defining what “some data” is and why we need to share it.

Ultimately the solution lies in transparency and choice. It begins already at the individual level. Governments and private companies should make their intended use of personal data transparent. Really transparent, in an understandable way. The individual should then have the choice to say whether their data can be used. We are all responsible citizens who have sovereignty over ourselves. So in addition to transparency from governments and companies, we need to educate ourselves more about the implications of data privacy and especially our children who still only see the good in the digital world. 

Then there is the societal level. Wide segments of our polarized societies around the world express an historically low level of trust in governments. Therefore, it is so much more important, then, that we do support them in passing strong data protection legislation and ensuring its implementation. Additionally, legislation like the EU’s AI Act embody the same principles of sovereignty over our own data. 

And this legislation has to be taken seriously. Governments, companies and other organizations need to implement these measures and the principles behind them as quickly as possible. They need to offer us as citizens a real choice, ie. services should be still available with limited, pseudonymized or anonymized data, even in a more limited way. Finally the data processing must be fair, always respecting the fundamental rights of the individuals when they cannot be discriminated against based on their gender, political opinion, race, sexual orientation, disability, etc. and can exercise their data rights such as data access correction, transfer or deletion.

Beyond these measures, companies like Allianz need to use our voice and take a public stance on them. We need to work more closely together and take a stronger shared stance about responsible AI and ethical data management. This collaboration will be critical for us moving forward to ensure people are treated fairly and humanely.

Why should we trust the state? Why should we trust the private sector? Why should we trust each other? Why should we “come together” when this is about each of us protecting our own individual privacy? Because there is only so much we can do as individuals. It is the power of unity that will protect us the most. We cannot function as societies in which everyone is closed off in fear or where we are all exposed to the tyranny of those who would abuse our data or spy on us and everyone else.

It is only when we come together on this common ground that we can ensure the privacy of each of us is equally protected and enjoy the boundless benefits of digitalization.