The New Surveillance State: Why Data Privacy Is Now Essential to Democracy

Link: Laura Maccleery in TechPolicy.Press.

Data privacy was always essential to democracy, but now that democracy itself is in dire straits the need for strong protections are more obviously pressing.

As the author notes:

"When the government can track where you go, whom you associate with, and what you spend your money on, it violates the Fourth Amendment. It also chills First Amendment freedom of expression, undermines your freedom to travel, and destroys what Justice Louis Brandeis famously called “the right to be left alone” — the fundamental privacy right that underlies American liberty."

The trick, of course, is that we now probably can't expect those protections from our government. Instead, we're going to need to build new systems ourselves - applications, platforms, utilities, and infrastructure that inherently protect our right to be left alone.

These include apps like Signal, but I predict a larger trend: there will be a swing back from cloud systems, which are inherently open to inspection by third parties, to self-hosted and on-premise solutions. When you control your infrastructure, you can be more sure of who can access it.

There are other ways to achieve this: third-party key management is a decent halfway house, but it's really important to consider who holds the keys and how they can be managed. Many require the AWS Key Management Service specifically: a monoculture that doesn't exactly scream resilience.

So, self-hosting. That trend will be spearheaded in places like Europe that are already investing in leaving US-based software behind given the machinations of the current administration. But we already know that the effects of legislation like GDPR were far-reaching; I expect to see this pendulum swing everywhere.

In the past, this led to insecure, half-maintained infrastructure inside organizations. For a new era of self-hosted apps to work, the underlying infrastructure must function much more like an iPhone: fewer configuration options, stronger security, and a user experience that doesn't require deep technical knowledge to administer.

There's an opportunity here: both to protect peoples' privacy through privacy tools with fantastic user experiences and to create stronger models for infrastructure that provide more levels of abstraction, automatic upgrades, and everything you'd expect from consumer devices.

Regardless of where the industry goes, the core claim here is, I believe, right: there is no democracy without privacy, and we must protect it at all costs.

[Link]