You're never alone when you're on Google

At first glance, it seems reasonable to say that most of us have incoherent, even contradictory, ideas about our privacy.

We say cherish it, but we really want to know each other and see each other (we post on Instagram, we boast on Twitter). We feel disturbed when the same ads are chasing us, but we get angry when our iPhones do not know where we are when we're looking for a restaurant ("No, I'm not in this area!"). We abhor that they extract and collect our data, but we prefer to use Google instead of DuckDuckGo (what does Google take after our steps as a killer); We use Facebook (whether or not it collects our personal information, like many internal organs); and we click on "I agree" when downloading our apps, knowing that these apps communicate with others and tell them how much we eat, what music we listen to and when we ovulate.

Also: did you make a difference to warn us about the use of cookies on websites, thanks to the recent rule issued by the European Union? In my case, I would say no. These alerts make me feel worse because they reveal my impatience, my carelessness, my daily failures of self-regulation. It seems that I give my privacy all the time in exchange for a short-term advantage, instead of trying to follow the decision tree to refuse the use of cookies.

Therefore, the question is: why are so many people constantly acting against the values ​​of privacy to which we are so faithful? What explains this phenomenon that experts have called the paradox of privacy?

As an attempt at reconciliation – and atonement and clarification – I've made many phone calls and read a lot about it in recent weeks; Much of my research was online. In the end, I was almost exclusively harbaded by Google ads regarding books and podcasts related to privacy: I was at the bottom of a metaphor home. This is perhaps my most liberating discovery: our contradictory impulses are in fact quite rational. As Alessandro Acquisti, professor of information technology at Carnegie Mellon points out, each of the contradictory beliefs in a paradox is perfectly well founded.

Why do so many of us constantly act in a way that is directly opposed to the values ​​of privacy to which we are so faithful?

Let's take, for example, why we always omit the small letters of the Internet. In 2008 -2008! Prior to Instagram, Uber or WhatsApp, two of Carnegie Mellon's colleagues at Acquisti were calculating how long it would take for an average user to read the privacy policies of all the websites he visited in the UK. only one year. The answer: more than thirty business days, with an opportunity cost of 781 million dollars.

That's why it seems so sensible to ignore these policies. It would seem even a necessity.

There is an explanation for this supposed paradox: to fully understand our weaknesses as digital creatures, much more time and energy is needed. In addition, it would require a completely new set of instincts, a cognitive framework radically different from what we have now.

Joyce Searls, a privacy activist and consultant in Santa Barbara, Calif., Reminds people that we are just beginning to understand who we are or who we are on the Internet, in part because we are talking about an immaterial experience. We think we are alone when we explore the mists of cyberspace. A search on Google equates to a navigation in the Yellow Pages, because it looks just as isolated. But that's not it. They watch us, they follow us; we simply do not realize because we can not see it or feel it.

This suggests another reason why we are less conscientious about our Internet habits: most of us have not paid a humiliating price to be observed or followed. "We have had a huge experience that involves walking naked without noticeable consequences," said Searls. Why bother to dress?

So we continue. Although all quietly collect our research, preferences, bades, anxieties.

Google Amazon Facebook. YouTube Pandora Pinterest The weather channel. Reddit Wikipedia. Major League Baseball PornHub Zillow. Your journal Your bank Your cellular operator All

Danah Boyd, founder of the Data & Society Research Institute, may have said it the best way when she wrote that we are "public default, private by the effort".

For most people, this effort – changing their appearance, buying things, connecting with others, and absorbing the news – is too much. "There is an idea that the fight to protect your data can not be won," says Carnegie Mellon's Acquisti. "You should learn to use other tools, it will be expensive in the long run and it may not help you because your data is already there."

The resignation also explains the paradox of privacy. This is a perfectly rational answer to a situation in which human beings have very little interference.

If this is the case, my initial instinct – to say that our habits are "contradictorily neurotic" – is actually not very generous. "This is not a neurotic contradiction", said in the nicest possible way Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School. "It's an intolerable contradiction."

Zuboff is the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, an ambitious book that examines the new corporate trafficking of human customs and the consequences of this phenomenon in our society. He thinks it's absurd – not to mention that we blame the victim – to say that we are irresponsible with our online privacy. Rather, he argues, we have no other choice. On the Internet, this is where we meet our individual needs because we can not do it in real life. "The real institutional world has abandoned us," he said.

As he points out, we call the airlines – or our insurers or our banks – and we spend ten minutes talking to robots, then another fifteen minutes waiting to talk to a real person. Is it any wonder we prefer to deal with health, travel and financial issues online?

Zuboff shows the same compbadion for our promiscuities in social networks, regardless of their impact on our privacy. Online status has become a way to compensate for living in an environment of economic instability. Maybe it even brings economic dividends. Influential people on the Internet can generate income. (Three words that chill my blood: Instagram celebrity).

What many of us do not realize when we are online is how the technologies we use shape our ideas about privacy without our being aware of it; This gives another form to our behaviors.

This is one of the main themes of Re-Engineering Humanity, Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger. They argue that it is not accidental that we are now dealing with our privacy in a different way. The tools we use have been designed with this objective in mind.

I think, in my own life, to the first stranger I accepted as a friend on Facebook. I do not remember his name anymore. I just remember to realize that, as far as I know, I was not the friend of a friend, but that we had communicated through the same name. a series of scattered links. Nevertheless, I clicked on "OK". From one moment to the next, I did it quite regularly, especially in 2014, when I had a book for sale. (Status! Visibility! Sales!) And all was well with this free system until the day when one of these strangers – someone who had asked for my friendship, not the other way around 39; has never been the opposite) – I wrote a hateful message on Facebook Messenger to let me know that he had me on TV and thought that I was a perfect fool.

I deleted it from my friends list. But I also felt anguished and angry at myself: at that time, I had surely seen pictures of my son, of my marriage at the town hall, of my high school meeting twenty-five years later. How did he decide that something like that was … okay?

"The risk that" privacy "is not captured is this disturbing idea," says Frischmann, an expert in Internet law at Villanova University. How to add this unknown person to your Facebook circle or, as happened to Frischmann, to ensure that your child returns from school with an exercise tracking device, which would appear to be a total win (you get free technology the child could learn something about healthy habits until you think what it means.

"A generation of children is conditioned to accept the physical surveillance of others without hesitation," he said.

The way we use the great technologies is not only based on our own desires, but also on the wishes of those who designed them. There is a frightening automation about it. ("I accept." Click). It's like we're robots.

The irony – or maybe it's not? – is that the demographic sector most sensitive to the influence of these technologies can also be the most expert in the protection of privacy. Danah Boyd was very clear. His book It's Complicated states that teens are concerned about privacy. The difference is the way they try to keep it. Some, for example, publish only everything. "They are obfuscated by the bombings," he says.

They know that our mind is an inefficient, slow and noisy drummer when we separate the wheat from the straw. But if you tell everyone, nobody knows where to look or what's important.

Of course, there is someone in American life who regularly floods the area, especially with his Twitter account. He has also been able to distract and confuse by this deceptively simple way. According to a recent Gallup poll, its approval rate is now 46%. Nearly half of Americans do not believe they are naked at all. They still believe, against all odds, that the emperor is wearing clothes.

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