What is privacy?

What is privacy and why it’s important to keep it? Why it is important? What will happen if you lost some information? Of course password of my bank card is private? Why talks with my relatives are private? What will happen if I lost privacy? Let’s discuss! Answer these questions for yourself, so we will understand the truth.

For me Privacy is one of my top priorities because knowledge is power.

The more knowledge somebody/something has about my behavior the more power they have to manipulate me to do whatever they want.

Ok then, let’s simulate a situation: you are studying in university and you respect your privacy, so you don’t use Skype, Viber, WhatsApp, etc… But some students from your group do. And one day one of them calls his friend from another place with Skype. And they are talking about people they are studying with. And also he mentioned you. He thinks that you are good person, so he decides to describe you as much as he knows. That means that now Big Brother knows about you much more. So, the conclusion is: you can lost your privacy, at least partially, even without your knowledge about it. What do you think about it?

Privacy is a somewhat very personal thing. Each and everyone of us has a different perspective of what privacy is and what an information leak could mean for him/her.
Information is indeed power, so you have to be careful who you give your information to. Not everyone seems to understand that. It’s our job (in this case I mean the projects we do) to give easy tools for everyone to use and at the same time make people understand that privacy is important. Your data has a value, even if you don’t see that.

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I’m not sure if I have a strong opinion about this, but I would like to add this online article to the discussion. Back when a friend referred me to it, it was a good read with reasonable arguments:

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This is good article.

To answer the question from above - why make the things that complicated? It’s really much easier: they* know that my friends have my phone number which is pretty often located in a close location to my friend’s ones. Using this, some more metadata and the facebook profiles from the other students they can find out e.g. how old I am, which gender i am, what my hobbies are, etc. without ever having any personal data about me.

So, the point is, that as a “normal” person you pretty much have the decission from 0% (using WhatsApp is enough) to max 50-75% of privacy (e.g. not using a smartphone, as horrible as it sounds).

If I had the choice I’d just join those hacker groups who have their own bunkers and can easily cut off any connection to the outside world :wink:

Back to your question, I don’t think if someone says… that I like climbing, am 26 years old and my favourite color is red that someone can really use this information for anything but for advertising, maybe. Luckily it’s not that far yet.

I don’t really think that any one is going to describe me as “a guy who has an electric T-378 Lock on the entrance door and a 24-year old laptop from siemens with a modifyed FreeBSD OS”.**

  • I mean everyone who has interest in our data
    ** none of the descriptions are true, of course :wink:
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For the moment this data is mainly used for advertisting. For the moment :slight_smile:

The main reasons am an advocate of digital privacy are freedom and democracy.

As others have pointed out above, information is power. As it is always with power, it can be used in many ways, ranging from good to bad. Consequently, power should never be in the hands of a few. In a digital capitalistic age, it’s so easy and tempting to gather crazy amounts of information under one roof. The dangers and implications are huge for the future of humanity.

Privacy in communication is so essential in this context, together with decentralization, federation and encryption. Hence my interest in helping out with Kontalk, which has the potential to make this easy to reach people.

And let’s not forget, privacy is different than anonymity or secrecy, even though their ideas and implementations often overlap.

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