How Much Privacy Do We Want, Exactly?

The dorm was brand-new, so that was something, and I had a single room, which gave me privacy -- but I was lonely. Thinking back now, I wonder why I chose a room all by myself, after having been confined to my room at home. It probably felt safe, but I missed that college experience of having a fun roommate.

-- Ina Garten, "Be Ready When the Luck Happens, A Memoir"

We value privacy. The Standard Notes used to publish this article is built on privacy. Many of the options and laws we erected are for privacy, whether or not they works. But what are the things do we really want to be private, actually? Some of them are obvious, like you don't want anyone to gain access to your bank account, or your passwords. Other things are quite but not so obvious, like messages between you and your close friends that you don't want anyone else to know (and you hope your friend isn't a talkative parrot that goes tell everyone he/she meets), or journal entries that write your deepest feelings that you don't feel safe for anyone to know. And still others, like having a room for ourselves, feels good, but is it really what we want even though we feel calm than anxious living alone?

Privacy is a recent invention. In the past, people probably sleep together in one big room, at least for the poor. For the rich, in Europe, people surely had their own rooms, but they aren't accessed like hotel rooms where the door is built facing a corridor, but you have 2 doors to the left and right corner of your room, such that if someone else want to go into their room, they will have to pass by your room. Privacy wasn't a concern. Though, one cannot be sure if privacy come and go, like fashions, in Europe and in other parts of the world. But what one can be certain -- privacy isn't always the go to.

One don't know why people changed to value privacy. Probably because it was turned into a luxury, a commodity to be bought, and because people of all age look high upon the luxuries that the rich can enjoy, and perhaps the rich enjoyed privacy than being disturbed by the poor that was always thinking about getting a share of their wealth or something, then the poor admiringly see privacy as something luxurious that could be showed off to others if they attained it. Probably. But one don't know. And we're now getting the worse hit from it.

When Dr. Vivek Murthy coined the term 'loneliness epidemic', he listed quite a lot of factors that caused it, including the loss of traditional bonds, or the design of houses and cities, or technological influences, whatever. Sure, they're true, but if we had not chose privacy in the first place, would people have built a house that cares for privacy? On the other hand, social media and text messages probably manipulate our fear of interactions by encouraging us to give in to our fears. But if you want to extend your inner circles of comfort, you will have to push against the boundaries, against what your fears are telling you. Escape only reinforce your fears; only when you surpass your fear, again and again, can you convince yourself that next time, when you feel the same fear again, which never quite goes away, you know you can surpass them. That means, the more fearful you are of approaching something, the more you should do it. The more you do it, the more confidence you have muster, even if the fear didn't weaken.

The world isn't always a bad place. We certainly don't want what we write being a record in the government's file that determines our "social index" or whatever that says "you're a safe individual that won't harm the country". Yet, we unfairly want others to be tracked so that we feel safe knowing that we're living in a safe countryside, as if those others don't value privacy as much as you do, and how heart-hurt would you feel if you realized that others wanted you to be tracked so that they can feel safe. For some of the stuffs, like those we wrote in our personal diary, we won't want our friends to know about them, even close ones, perhaps because we're scared they know our other friends and they might accidentally or purposefully blurt out to them. Or perhaps we're scared they might not want to befriend us anymore because they see us as ugly creatures that they never quite understand, that we leave a negative impression so negative that they're willing to break the friendship with us. But it had been pressing on our heart for so long that we felt we cannot breathe, that we need to share it with someone, to not shoulder it ourselves, to let someone walk hand in hand with us, to know that there is still someone whom support us on what we do and that we're not abandoned. That's why we ended up telling our closest secrets to strangers -- the people we know absolutely nothing about, that we don't know what they would do with our 'data', but we feel safe because we can be sure (can we?) that they had no relationship whatsoever with our friendship circles, so they would never leak the burdens we shared with them with our friends and our friends would never learn of it, yet we puff out the air of relief when we finally shared it with someone. We also take advantage of assuming that we would never see them again, especially if we know they're foreigners or visitors, or we're on a plane or train to somewhere far and we came from different places -- that increase the chance of our secrets stayed secrets. Statistically true or not, one don't know. Probably in the past, when most people don't travel too far from their homeland and before the creation of the internet, but one's unsure of now. But certainly, our emotions told us that way, and we certainly feel safe, that can't be denied.

In the end, although we want privacy in some parts of our life, we might not want privacy in other parts of our life. Our feelings tell us otherwise, that we value privacy; but do we really understand our feelings, or is it just making us feel safe because we're living in a cage that we built for ourselves, free from uncertainty? Because what we value is not privacy, but the certainty of life, the lack of surprises (and we goes so far that we're willing to give up positive surprises like birthday just to not experience any negative surprises, if we cannot choose to filter away the negative). And certainty means control: we want to be in control of our life even if our life is never held in our hands but in that of nature. We painfully strive to ensure that everything that happens around us bend to our will, that by exerting our will per se, we can influence the events that happen around us to fit into the puzzle pieces that we had in our minds exactly as we expected them to happen. We were shocked, like the mom and dad of a 3-year-old, to realize that their babies were never their string puppet that by the flick of a finger they can stop it from crying and asking for food, and only when they felt like it, with the flick of a finger, pulled the string to start it crying so they can share some fatherly or motherly love only at the time when they wanted to, not when they had something else to do and it didn't bend to their will to stop disturbing them. Do you even have privacy if you have a child (below 10 or 12) at home? In a world where both parents value privacy, we resort to hiring a maid to take care of the child, sending them to day care nursery, when what they need most was motherly attachment that they need to acquire before they can detach when they got older (because what you never acquired, you cannot detach from). We think we're giving them what they really need: food and drinks, a roof to cover them from sun and rain (which may takes decades to pay back if your salary is low, and you may never have such security if it is rented than owned), and their health and safety. But is that really what the child need? It's time to rethink whether the assumption you held are valid. Even the poor, what they need most is respect and relationship (isolation), not money:

When you're poor, no one wants to speak to you, everyone is sorry for you, no one wants to drink with you.

-- Theodore Zeldin, "The Hidden Pleasures of Life"

We are given the chance to meet people from the other end of the world which only the most adventurous can afford a few centuries ago. If the fear of shipwrecks and pirates in the past prevented people from leaving their homeland, if seeing others as barbarians strengthened our prejudices; in a world where we strive to made everyone equal (even if that's an unattainable goal), to see everyone past their stereotypes (in its most ideal, though most cannot look past their inherited/acquired stereotypes), and the invention of planes that allowed the richer to travel trans-continental and the poorer to travel within their continent but still hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away from their homeland, it is a shame that we prefer privacy instead of taking the opportunity to meet people so far away that our ancestors hadn't had the chance to meet. It's a shame that we didn't break away the ties, the stereotypes that our parents whom lived in the past imposed on us and pursue what we valued as ideals. The easiest way to break away from a stereotype is to know a person from that stereotypical class in person, as a unique person, rather than as an abstract entity, an NPC -- and we restrict ourselves from knowing them just because we're taught to not interact with them. We never try. We never gave them a chance. Instead, we sit inside our cozy room, all in private, watching the news that only spread the negative about others, reading the posts which only the negative catches eyeballs and likes, and further write words that enraged because we need to feel we're part of someone, that we have an identity, even if that identity is acquired, even if we deliberately chose to be manipulated -- we just need to belong.

And so we end up as someone whom vent our anger at a group, as if the group is applicable to every single individual in the group, never asking that if we belong to a group, do we really fit into such single category? People meekly accept the labels that others assigned to them even when that's not true. E.g. a person you identified as "White" you assumed they're not "Islam" when they can be one. Or every single human belonging to Israel is bad and every single human belonging to Gaza is good. We never think on the individual level, because we cozily sit in our private room, enjoying our private life, getting our news (ahem, brainwashed) from respected sources, all while enjoying a cup of coffee and feeling great because of the silence.

If privacy is really that great, the rise of extremisms, the hike of loneliness, and the yearn for respect and admiration and a pair of listening ear should have proven otherwise.