Week 13 Response -- The Shared Ownership of Individual Privacy

This post is a response to the question "Should we care if the government watches us if we have nothing to hide? Why or why not?" posed by @joshweertman.
Before going to Mr. Miller's talk on Wednesday, I would have said that if we have nothing to hide, then we shouldn't care about the government watching us. After Mr. Miller's talk, however, I realize the value of privacy and how each person has something to hide, even if they don't know it. In his talk, Mr. Miller mentioned that there is a certain intimacy and tenderness behind relationships we create and things we do in our lives. While people may not care if the government sees them scrolling on Instagram, they will care if the government sees personal text messages, pictures, and other content they think is private. I think there is a misconstrued idea of Big Tech surveillance and the breaching of privacy; People think that their activity on these Big Tech sites is the only thing that is tracked, but the unfortunate truth is that it extends far beyond that. Everyone takes pride in privacy; it establishes control over each person's life by making the release of personal information a choice. Allowing Big Tech to look at and share our information and privacy is extracting our power and fueling theirs. Lastly, just because Big Tech is considered a professional system, that does not mean that they are the only ones who can view personal information. Google has been hacked multiple times, as well as billions of users with Google accounts. Therefore, although we think we know the organizations and systems that can see our information, there is never true certainty because of the fragility of the internet. People take comfort in solidarity, which is why Big Tech surveillance is brushed off so easily. However, people fail to realize that there is no solidarity when it comes to each person's unique thoughts, relationships, and information. It is something that should be protected because that freedom and privacy should be individually owned, not divided between the individual and the government.

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