…wait a second. Is that actually what it means? Are these our options? A world with no innovation, damned for eternity in the technological dark ages, or does it mean something else?

I believe it means something else, but it seems to be a largely misunderstood concept. Sure I call out the current model, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like nice things! Hell, I’m writing this on Medium because it’s genuinely awesome.

So let’s look at some assumptions that cause the confusion

1. Privacy Means No Data

This is a common assumption when privacy is mentioned in the media. The concept that, to have privacy we would invariably have to give up our social data and as a result lose some of the genuinely amazing insights that occurs there.

It is this common assumption that a lot of privacy policies are actually built around, where users are somehow convinced that the only way to have nice things is to be turned into a product.

But this is a fallacy. Privacy implies ownership, and control, the ability to be free from observation (and profiling), not the enforced state of being unable to share your data to an individual service at your discretion.

You want to give your GPS location over to a maps/traffic service who monitors in real time traffic conditions in your local city? Absolutely! But to provide this service, do they need any personally identifiable information? Nope.

So privacy doesn’t mean “no data”, it means no centralized data oversight, and no generalized data rules. It means the user owns their data, and in turn gets to control how, and where it is shared (including the implicit right to revoke that data).