"Giving up our liberty for free, one click at a time"

How much data do we want to give Facebook?

Turning the details of our lives over to Google and Facebook is making them rich at the expense of our freedoms, argues Rupert Myers.

There was a time when privacy meant locking your door and enjoying the space to think, and to avoid the interference or observation of others. Now physical privacy is only a small part of what we should expect. Over each attack by the state on individual liberty there has been argument, but there are few lasting victories for those on the libertarian side of these debates.

In 2006 the Labour government gave up in their attempt to introduce a similar bill to the one which will be announced in the 2012 Queen’s speech allowing intelligence agencies “on demand” access to electronic websites and communications. There will be the same bargaining process that there is every time a law seeks to reduce our freedoms: the proposers will ask for more than they expect to get, and there will be opposition from the same groups. I expect eventually that we will lose another immeasurable aspect of our freedom, and the drafting of the next bill will begin.

The legislators’ approach is wavelike in its erosion of diminishing island of liberties, coming in obvious and easily identifiable crests to which we can at least point and for which we can prepare. What has changed – what gives proposers of this current bill hope – is our behaviour, and that behaviour is formed by a different, constant erosion. The rising tide has come from internet start-ups.

Facebook launched in 2004. I joined at university on the 19th May 2005, when it was still exclusive, cool, and still “The Facebook”. This was the first site which got us to share private data with others in the network, because it was exclusive, and what we got in return was more information. We became unimpressed with the expansion of Facebook to include anyone who wished to join, and tended to reduce the amount of information we shared. Now, at the age of 27, some of my friends have left, and those who never signed up are less inclined to change their minds. Despite this, Facebook managed something remarkable: it brought us from a standing start to a place where we were sharing lists of our contacts, announcements of our love lives, unguarded photographs, and innermost thoughts.

Those who are growing up and joining now are doing so from a position of total immersion in the concept. One day people may be astonished that we ever lived in a world where people didn’t have access to Street View photographs of every road, public timelines of our personal lives, and a constant feed of the thoughts and feelings of everyone on earth. The landscape in which legislators will quietly call for greater powers to monitor us will be radically different. There may be few who can opt-out, and fewer who remember it being any other way.

Examples of the cavalier attitude of internet start-ups to our privacy are everywhere. Hidden away in the terms & conditions of the recently launched Google Drive – a free online storage facility – was a clause entitling Google to do almost anything with information even if the user quits: “When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google … a worldwide licence to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works … communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content … This licence continues even if you stop using our Services ...”

In 2009 Facebook updates rendered information on users such as their name, picture, city, gender, and friends automatically publicunless individuals opted out.

Now even newspapers which might otherwise be considered in favour of privacy like the Guardian and the Independent encourage viewers who come to their sites via social networks to install applications which automatically monitor usage and publish data on their reading habits.

The commercialisation of our personal information is not benign. First, for the obvious reasons to do with the integrity of these companies, questions about the ownership of information, and the willingness of some to do what is asked of them by countries which censor information to curtail democracy. Second, there is the way in which commercialisation colours the relationship between governments and citizens, collecting information ripe for picking by the state, whilst encouraging us all not to worry about privacy.

A recently published Boston Police Department subpoena shows what Facebook already hands over when required. If recent scandals teach us anything about privacy, it is that we should be wary of what we centralise and what we make available to law enforcers. These sources of information are all too easily hacked, and the people with access to them are too easily wooed by money or ideology to use them illegitimately.

Every time a social network changes making it easier to share, the baseline position for individuals in any debate on civil liberties shifts. We are being encouraged to alter our own values when it comes to privacy at the glossy, sexy invitation of internet services. Every private moment made public by the internet might increase the value of a company to shareholders, but that value comes directly from the value of our privacy, click by click.