Good morning. I'm not quite young enough to be a Digital native ( I still, just about, remember a world before the internet), but I'm definitely a digital migrant.
Because I've been using social networks since my late teens, I've been quite blasé about privacy online.
But I'm more and more convinced that privacy has the potential to be a major social justice issue. In a very real way, the developed world now runs on a data economy.
Information about us (who we know, what we buy, what causes we support) is worth real money, and we are giving it away. Our identity, in so far as our identity is made
up of information, is becoming a tradable commodity. You know that little box that pops up on many websites with a message about cookies? It's sadly not an offer of
baked goods but a casually worded warning that you are giving permission to be followed around the internet, your every idle click recorded. And those recordings can
end up in unexpected places. This week the European Commission has warned EU citizens that they should consider closing their accounts with a major social network if
they don't want their information being passed to, or gathered by, American security services. Yesterday, a major search engine lost an appeal to prevent users suing
them for serious breaches of privacy.
In this new world, data is money, and therefore, I think, data is also power. There is a rich seam in Christian scriptures which is very concerned about power, about
the relationships between the weak and the strong. The much maligned Old Testament is rich with teaching on this subject, and when God is portrayed as angry it is
often directed at the abuse of power. The Bible does not, of course, include references to tech giants or MI5, but I think the principle holds. A lack of concern for
privacy allows, at worst, the strong to leverage their power against the weak with more precision. Privacy should mean that information about us, our likes and
dislikes, fears and hopes, friends and enemies, can't be used against us. It doesn't matter if this is by oppressive governments quashing dissent, or corporations
targeting their advertising in ever more coercive ways.
Those of us who've been nervous about privacy campaigns rightly trumpet the importance of openness for building relationships. In Christian thought, vulnerability and
authenticity with God and with others is fundamental. But these are relationships built on trust, where we know the person we are sharing with and they are also open
with us. This is not the case when our data is gathered online, and the power is all on the side of those doing the gathering. God, and those who've built relationship
with us, get to see our deepest selves. But everyone else should have to earn it.