What is the connection between a philosophy of Liberalism and wherever possible, not allowing your personal information into the public domain?
A significant component of individual liberty is personal privacy. In this sense, institutions such as governments, public service agencies, law enforcement and corporations have goals which diametrically oppose your liberty: they actively try to collect your personal information. If you make it easy for them, you’re not only eroding your own liberty, but everyone else’s as well, by contributing to a culture of acceptance of unnecessary rules.
People do make it easy for “them” in three main ways: providing unnecessary information on forms, giving away personal information in direct surveys or surveys masquerading as “competitions” and the egregious stupidity of people glibly putting their personal details all over the internet.
This latter naivety is particularly prevalent amongst young people; text, photos and videos of all manner of embarrassing stupidity. It’s not just embarrassing photos either: why would anyone put any of their personal details ANYWHERE on the internet? You must be mad.
Business information is different. Placing professional profiles on the web is common practice. Certainly anyone who is even occasionally quoted in the press will find many entries if they Google themselves. Politicians, academics and business people want this: generally, the more professional media coverage one gets, the more expert one appears, the more influence one generates and the higher salary one can command.
But why let complete strangers across the globe know your personal details?
That’s a recipe for not just identity theft, but being tracked and evidence collected against you. I don’t just mean criminal evidence, because that won’t apply to most people. What I’m chiefly referring to is the ability of anyone at all to selectively collate public information on you, via the choice of particular search parameters. These choices may be due to an a priori bias, or possibly to one formed based on what information about you they initially discover. The “evidence” collected is then assembled into a skewed representation of you, with a consequently skewed judgment of / against you likely to follow; why is someone seeking information on you unless they intend to use it in making some decision concerning you?
The information collectors could be corporations: potential employers or your bank or insurer. They could be a government department or law enforcement officials. In any of these cases, such people will make a decision about you based on a subset of information you cannot see. They will almost certainly flatly refuse to provide you with the information which led to their decision. In some cases, such as compiling a short list of candidates to approach for a job, or suspects for a crime, you may not even be aware a decision has been made.
If you tightly filter information about you which reaches the public domain, you will constrain the decisions the above people can make. If you don’t, their decisions will be guided by their own biases as they cherry pick from your plethora of personal narratives.
Even if, in your opinion, the current government in your country is benign, governments and their policies can change. Do you really want to be voluntarily loading your personal information onto an unknown number of databases when that information can be permanently stored? Who is to know what future governments will decide to do with it and crucially, what decisions will be made about you as a result of the picture of you formed by some possibly unaccountable official?
I don’t agree with everything Julian Assange says, but his assertion that social networking sites are “spy machines” is pretty close to the mark. All it takes is a change to the law and police or any other authority can read your emails at will.
Widespread social acceptance of private information being essentially public and available to governments and corporations has a more subtle and insidious effect: it raises the threshold for public outrage at institutional attempts to monitor and control individual behaviour.
Additionally, it increases the likelihood that institutional policy makers will see as reasonable the imposition of rules and procedures which make their roles easier or more profitable, because they believe citizens or customers will be less likely to complain.
I do not mean just in government, the public service and law enforcement. Corporations will also feel such actions are more likely to be accepted. This could be companies such as banks, insurance companies or telecommunications providers monitoring your behaviour and possibly restricting it via financial incentives or penalities such as increased premiums or restricted services. It could also mean the imposition of internet and email monitoring or drug testing in the workplace.
What would you say to pictures on Facebook of yourself privately indulging in "behaviour materially detrimental to the image of the organisation" being a sackable offence?
Don't think it couldn't happen: it already has.
Gradually, rules and restrictions which would previously have been unacceptable are at first grudgingly tolerated, then eventually seen as the status quo. It is such incremental, creeping erosion of civil liberties via technology's facilitation of the organisation of information which is the greatest threat to freedom in a liberal democracy.
I suggest that a society which tolerates its personal information becoming public domain is more likely to tolerate a larger set of rules governing social interaction.
How many times have you heard the dishonest representation: "If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear"?
It's the use of the word "hide" which is the problem. Hide is an active word, as is dishonest, so hiding is seen by most people as dishonest.
There is a big difference between dishonesty, which is an active decision to influence one’s environment and being closed, which is a response to one's environment. Someone who is closed can tell lies, but not be a fundamentally dishonest or untrustworthy person. They may be lying to keep information away from genuinely untrustworthy authorities who would use it against them, such as in a totalitarian state like China or Iran. In personal business dealings, they may be scrupulously honest.
Dishonesty is where there is no material penalty for openness, but the person lies anyway, usually for short term, personal gain.
Thus, the statement "if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear" is a misrepresentation, because it implies active dishonesty is the only reason for fear in that context. Declining to provide information is not equivalent to hiding it. The former is simply being closed, often as a rational response to genuine concerns of misuse of the information.
To rephrase the statement in its correct modality: "I'm not giving you that information, because you have no reasonable cause to know it".
It's the mindset implied by the phrase that's most important: don't tolerate arbitrary collection of your information and you'll be less likely to tolerate unnecessary and ideologically motivated rules aimed at governing your social interactions, which require a large bureaucracy and a police state to enforce them.
How do you think the fraternal idealism of socialist revolutions so quickly turned into repressive police states?
How do a government and its executive run a centrally planned economy without collecting large amounts of information and using it to govern social as well as economic interactions?
If you willingly give away your information, you’re giving away your liberty with it.
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