Anonymity? Privacy? Nope

Mark Greathouse

(12/2020) Have you ever sought genuine privacy? Free from your buying habits being tracked? Free from prying eyes tracking your Internet history? Free from anyone knowing where you’ve been or where you’re going? Have you yearned to be able to truly hide? To be anonymous?

Can we achieve anonymity? Can we hope for any privacy? Can we ever hope to be truly free, as in no one violating our private space? In an era of big-tech corporate giants glomming onto details of our personal lives six ways to Sunday, it seems just about impossible for us to hide from prying eyes. What myriad surveillance cameras and GPS enablers don’t capture, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk enthusiastically record for posterity. Do you use a credit card? Piece of cake for authorities to track where you’ve used it. Raising funds, using a bank…it’s all being tracked. Then, there are our huge, metastasizing state and federal governments that demand all sorts of information ranging from taxes to the abundant regulatory compliances that require permissions and still more information about you. Register your car? Register your gun? Escape? You ever hear of "terms of use?" I must suppress the urge to offer a gazillion LOLs.

There are "escapes" of sorts from online information larceny and deception like DuckDuckGo, Gab, DLive, Parler, and ProtonMail, but they as yet lack significant muscle. As to the government hoarding of our information, so long as we vote in politicians that grow government and employ bureaucrats that perpetuate data collection…well, blame falls in our very own laps. As a last resort, you can chuck your phone and credit cards and go live the life of a hermit somewhere in the wilds of North America. Lots of luck with that.

There are upsides to some of these freedom-stealing devices. Surveillance cameras can come in handy in video-taping perpetrators of crimes, recording accidents, controlling traffic, and the like. GPS sure is handy in helping us find our destinations. To a degree, we seem willing to pay a price for these intrusions into our privacy.

We are not anonymous and likely never again will be. Our challenge is what do we do about it? The scariest part is how the big-tech corporate oligarchies and our governments use our information. Let’s face it; they can be quite intrusive. Your buying habits can be traced resulting in advertising thrust at you per the whim of some algorithm that deems it appropriate to those habits. Your deepest, darkest online secrets can be exposed. You can be "cancelled" for espousing politics counter to the views of those big-tech oligarchs. Your posted opinions can be deemed offensive according to some vague ever-changing standard and deleted by an unfeeling, pretty-much-anonymous algorithm. Talk about lack of anonymity, a delete by big-tech can follow you the rest of your life – even if the big-tech bullies were mistaken.

Folks often reflexively compare this situation to Big Brother in George Orwell’s famous novel 1984. We voluntarily stand before a two-way telescreen several times a day offering up our personal lives on the altar of information control. But it’s worse than that. Just as with Orwell’s classic, the very media we connect with are indoctrinating us, brainwashing us with their particular slant on history and culture. Big-tech oligarchs now fancy themselves the arbiters of truth. They not only capture our lives, but they determine what we can and cannot see. Language is cancelled, ideas are cancelled, free speech is no longer free. What data they cannot pull from you voluntarily, they will extort by threat of suspending your privileges.

Religion, gender, race, environment, guns, property rights, and more cultural issues are under ever-more-intense biased assault by leftist idealogues who condescendingly consider themselves superior in intellect to the "deplorables" or "undeserving" masses that hold what have long been held as traditional American values. They view the U.S. Constitution as a worthless scrap created by old white men not enlightened by the glorious globalist world of socialist success…oops…sorry, there’s actually never been socialist success anytime or anywhere. Besides, it most often turns into totalitarianism. Equal misery for all.

The big-tech oligarchies operate under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which grants them wide-ranging immunities from liability that enable them to censor freely and do as they will with our private information. They effectively answer only to themselves, not to the people.

Is there a way out of the lack-of-privacy morass we face? That anonymity thing sure sounds attractive. Escape would be great, though we’d sure miss friends and family. (I find myself hoping for some modern version of John Galt…oh, you’d have to read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged to understand that reference.) Just how do we bring the behemoths of information under our control? Do we break up Google like we did years back with Ma Bell? What about Facebook and Twitter? How do we rein in their intrusive censorship? Where is our anonymity? Where indeed are our freedoms? Lots of questions. The answers entail heavy lifting to offset big money. Twitter has recently received wrist-slap fines for political campaign violations and the Department of Justice is pursuing antitrust violations against Google, but these efforts are inadequate at best.

I do have to admit to escaping, at least in my own mind, by writing novels, scripts, and poetry mostly about the freedoms of the old frontier days of the American west. No surveillance cameras or GPS tracking on the wide-open praries. Thanks to a great publisher, I’m blessed to be able to share those escapes with readers. But the world of escape into the literary arts is a band-aid at best.

So, I’ll tell you honest and tell you true, we either get used to the lack-of-privacy dilemma or we support initiatives that grab it back. Online media alternatives are a start, as are electing legislators willing to take on the big-tech oligarchs. Missouri’s Senator Josh Hawley took on an antitrust initiative against Google back when he was that state’s attorney general and last year introduced the "Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act" in the U.S. Senate which modifies Section 230. Hawley’s bill doesn’t solve all of the privacy problem, but at least it’s a start. Privacy problems are going to metastasize at an exponential rate, if we don’t deal with them now.

Considering that your personal data has intrinsic value and if you’re feeling feisty, send those big-tech oligarchs an invoice for the use of your personal information. Market research companies pay folks that participate in focus groups, why shouldn’t big tech pay you? Insert laugh track here.

Worries about religious persecution, genderism, racism, environmentalism, gun rights, property rights, and the like will be the least of our worries if Big Brother isn’t brought to a screeching halt today. We can all do our parts no matter how seemingly small, but we dare not ignore the problem of stolen privacy, the theft of the last shreds of our anonymity.

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