There are more and more people who really care about their privacy in the online world. For example there is this Reddit community on /r/privacytoolsio that is full of people, who refuse to use Google, Facebook or Microsoft products, because they really don’t like the piles of personal information that are collected by these companies.

So they prefer services like Protonmail for emails, Linux as their main OS and LineageOS instead of Android. Of course, everything must be open-source, so people know there is no backdoor or anything like that.

You can say they are paranoid, because no one cares that you watch anime and share pics of kittens on social networks. But I could recommend you a TED speech by Glenn Greenwald who explains why privacy really matters.

It matters to me. Anyway, this behaviour is totally capitalistic. Really… Some people demand tools and services that respect their privacy and market offers it. You are concerned that Facebook or Google collects a bunch of your data, so you use a different service.

But what is funny here is, the privacy-oriented people seem to blame capitalism sometimes. Actually, it seems they call all data collecting “Surveillance capitalism” (mostly based on Shoshana Zuboff’s novel) which is, in my opinion, kinda unfair. They also worship the government a lot. They support GDPR (European union law that protects privacy – at least officially) and all these types of laws.

I understand where this came from. It’s true that many privacy companies collect lots of personal data of the users, so they can sell it to third parties. It’s true Google knows about you more than you know about yourself.

Data collecting of private companies should be a really concerning thing also for libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, because the companies cooperate with governments and they willingly give the collected data to them, if they say you’re dangerous, or a terrorist or anything.

That’s actually ironic, because government is the most dangerous thing ever when we talk about privacy. So if you want to blame capitalism that abuses your privacy and hope that the government’s laws and regulations help you, you should know that the government knows everything about you.

Government knows who you are, where you live, where do you work, what people you meet, where you are physically right now (if you have your smartphone with you), how much money you have on your account (lucky we have cryptocurrencies), if you visited any demonstration recently, what you do online, what pills you take, what health issues you have, what animals you own, what is your race and religion, if you have a driver’s license or not and much more.

As Snowden revealed, government has access to your emails, phone calls, what you do on social networks and so on. I really respect this guy and I recommend his book Permanent Record. I think he did a lot for libertarianism even though he’s not a libertarian himself. He’s sometimes the opposite actually. 🙂

Funny thing – the government knows everything about you, but you are not allowed to know anything about the government. All government’s programs are top secret and it’s a crime to reveal them.

And you don’t know how the government will look like in the following ten years. Maybe it’ll transform itself into some Orwellian and Kafkaesque world, so that you can be executed based on the things you said in an email today. So that’s better when the governments know less than more. Don’t forget – Adolf Hitler used the information system developed by IBM to have lists of jews and other people he needed to “eliminate”.

So blaming capitalism from the data collection is unfair. Yes, private companies spy on you, so they can use your data for marketing and so on. But it’s not as dangerous as the government data collection. Of course, it’s not black and white, because some companies cooperate with the governments, yes. But it only proves we need less government, than more. And no, government won’t save your privacy. It does the exact opposite.