The morality of privacy and anonimity
In the Digital Age, privacy and anonymity are necessary preconditions for living a moral and free existence.
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Is being anonymous and seeking privacy morally right or wrong? Does morality have anything to do with privacy and anonymity?
To answer this, we first need to take two steps back: the first will help us understand the differences between privacy and anonymity, and the intersections between the two.
The second will help us shape a concept of morality and evaluate the criteria for defining what is morally right or wrong.
The invisible threads we carry
From a technological perspective, information is all the same: bits; zeros and ones. Information is a collection of data or signals that can be gathered, processed, or transmitted, and which have meaning or value for those who receive and analyze it. In computer science, information is associated with "digital data" that can be stored and analyzed by computers. Essentially, information is any data from which useful knowledge is derived.
Sometimes, information offers knowledge that directly refers to identified or identifiable individuals. In this case, information becomes something else: a set of invisible threads that, if followed carefully, inevitably lead to a physical person. This information is called personal data. Any information that can be related to an identified or identifiable individual is considered personal data. This brings another element into play: identity.
It is only by connecting these threads to a person's identity that we can qualify the information as personal data, as it will then carry meaningful and useful knowledge for identifying the person or learning something about them.
What is anonimity
Anonymity is thus a state of information that directly relates to our identity and the information that can be connected to our identity. A dataset can be considered anonymous when the digital threads are cut off from the start (or not created at all), making it impossible to restore the link to the person.
Unfortunately, everything we do and say today carries with it tons of information, with just as many tangles of threads that can be directly linked to us and our digital or physical identities.
This is why being anonymous today — in a broad and general sense — is really complicated. No one can ever be completely anonymous in every aspect of their life and in every action they take. We all carry invisible threads that connect us to scattered information across the Ether.
Pseudo-anonymity
Halfway between full identifiability and anonymity is what is technically called pseudo-anonymity.
Pseudo-anonymity occurs when the connection between identity and information is not completely eliminated but obscured. The thread is cut halfway, but it still has a beginning and an end that can be reconnected with the right tools and expertise. However, in some cases, the pseudonymization process is done so well that it becomes virtually impossible to reconnect the ends of the thread, effectively achieving a kind of anonymity.
Pseudo-anonymity is what Satoshi Nakamoto did with Bitcoin: separating identity and information related to transactions and replacing directly identifiable data (name, surname, etc.) with cryptographic identities.
The difference between anonymity and privacy
Anonymity and pseudo-anonymity differ significantly from the concept of privacy.
While the former two deal with the connection between identity and information, privacy concerns our ability to control where and how information connected to our identity travels.
Privacy is the ability to keep our information confidential from the public, meaning anyone outside our personal sphere. This means that a person can at the same time be anonimous and completely transparent in the way they handle a certain type of personal data (for example, publishing their personal thoughts on social networks) or completely identifiable but also extremely reserved (only talking with people in person).
However, if in the past, before the Internet and the Information Age, confidentiality could be absolute, today it is always relative.What we can do today is minimize the creation of data and choose to whom we make it accessible. For example: choosing whether to allow our ISP to see our traffic data or to grant this privilege to a VPN provider.
Anonymity, pseudo-anonymity, and privacy are variable and dynamic states of information. Absolute anonymity does not exist, just as absolute privacy does not exist. In the vast majority of cases, we oscillate between two extremes.
Morality
Morality, the subject of ethics (a branch of philosophy), is what allows us to distinguish between right and wrong. Morality is the philosophical approach that guides humans in determining the criteria for distinguishing between right and wrong; between good and evil.
Humans need morality because they are atypical living creatures. They do not have survival instincts analogous to those of animals, which know exactly what to do to survive from birth: hunt, fly, hide, camouflage. Humans are not so fortunate.
Everything humans know about themselves and the world around them, and what they need to do to survive, must be discovered. Humans have no other way to survive than to think, that is, to observe, gather information, and process it to the best of their intellectual abilities.
Unlike some animals, such as ants or bees, humans do not share a hive mind. Therefore, the survival of each human being depends exclusively on their individual ability to acquire knowledge about the world around them, process the information (thinking), and act rationally based on their thinking, i.e., in a way that increases their chances of survival.
Paraphrasing Ayn Rand: since humans are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to engage with others, agree or disagree, cooperate or not cooperate, each according to their own judgment.
Freedom is thus a fundamental requirement for acquiring knowledge about the world and thinking. It follows that human survival depends on their ability to think and act freely, without interference.
We can then affirm that, at the lowest levels of abstraction, everything that, based on our thinking, increases our chances of survival is morally right. In today's evolved societies, where survival is often a secondary concern, we could say that a morally right action is also one that allows us to pursue our happiness and fulfillment, be it economic, familial, social, or spiritual, without interference or aggression.
Freedom from interference
We have thus understood that for humans to survive, be happy, and fulfilled, they must be able to think (process information) and act (based on that information) freely — that is, without interference or aggression of any kind.
Someone might say that this is why we chose to come together in societies and create governmental superstructures: to protect ourselves from physical aggression by other antagonistic groups of individuals who, through violence, seek to manipulate our thoughts and actions (e.g., by subjugating us into servitude).
This thesis is reflected in the American Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men...
However, the world in 1776 was very different from today.
In 1776, the dangers people were exposed to were primarily physical. The role of governments was therefore to protect people's physical safety and ensure the protection of their natural rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Today, the dangers are also immaterial.
Every action we take is observed by computer systems and algorithms that process enormous amounts of data to create digital profiles and dossiers, which are then exploited by predictive and manipulative technologies. The world around us is no longer just what we directly observe with our senses but also what is filtered, digested, constructed, and disseminated through information systems and algorithms.
In such a context, protecting physical safety is no longer sufficient to ensure our ability to think and act freely; in other words, to ensure that our actions are morally oriented toward our well-being.
How can we presume to think freely in a world where everything we do is turned into bits, swallowed by algorithms engaged in systematic and pervasive manipulations of reality and people? The issue becomes even more complicated when governments and large corporations know our identity and can actively interfere with what we think or do through censorship or physical repression (arrests, sanctions, etc.).
Indeed, it is precisely the institutions that were supposed to protect us that are now trying to influence our thinking by manipulating and censoring information. They are the ones who want in every way to control the course of our lives, our relationships, our work, and to deprive us of everything we have and are.
The new servitude is not made of chains and sticks but of profiling algorithms, nudging, cameras, and surveillance systems that deprive individuals of their ability to think and act freely. In the Information Age, mass surveillance is a fundamental tool for the central planning of society, which requires the control of every variable. And it is well known: the greatest variables are human thought and action.
Anonymity and Privacy as preconditions for a moral existence
We can therefore affirm that in the Digital Age, privacy and anonymity are necessary preconditions for living a moral and free existence.
Given that, as already stated by the Cypherpunks in 1992, we cannot expect any protection from those who continuously attack us, both physically and digitally, the only way to be free and pursue a moral existence — that is, oriented toward our survival and happiness — is to develop our self-defense capabilities in the physical and digital realms.
If in 1776 this meant having a rifle at home and knowing how to use it, today we must turn to other types of weapons capable of protecting our freedom of thought and self-determination: cryptography, decentralized protocols, peer-to-peer systems, and privacy-enhancing technologies.
Like swords, crossbows, or firearms, these new cryptographical weapons are equalizing tools: they increase the cost of violence to the point of making it inconvenient for most aggressors in most cases. These are the tools that can help us maintain the level of privacy and (pseudo)anonymity that we need today to think and act freely, without external interference from the state or other aggressors.