When it comes to discussions about privacy, the terms of debate are important. We are battling to protect our personal data on many fronts: government mass surveillance; smart sensors tracking our every move; big data aggregating it all and more. But perhaps the biggest challenge in the coming years is convincing people to care enough to fight back against privacy erosion, which we often don’t even realise is happening.

It’s an issue that affects us as consumers, businesses and parents – and so we must continue to debate it; to keep governments from stamping out encryption in the name of security; to ensure our technology works for us rather than against us; to stop privacy from becoming an old-fashioned idea; and to inspire more people to actually care about the issues at stake.

Changing attitudes

The next 12 months will see further debate about government surveillance thanks to the investigatory powers bill, notes Paul Bernal, lecturer in IT at the University of East Anglia’s Law School: “This will remain a huge issue for the foreseeable future pretty much everywhere, but in particular in the UK, with the bill just starting its passage through parliament.”

There’s one area specifically where businesses can help shape the discussion, he says: “This includes the critical issue of encryption – and in particular government attitudes to it. If governments don’t change their stance and start to accept that strong encryption, without backdoors or equivalents, is critical for the future of the internet, the battle with the tech industry will only get worse.”

Bernal adds: “Businesses need to embrace encryption even more than they do now and lobby strongly for governments to change their position.” Apple has already begun this by intervening over the investigatory powers bill.

Framing the debate

Another key issue is that governments must alter how they frame the debate over surveillance, particularly the suggestion that citizens must give up privacy for safety. If we don’t allow security services access to our digital messages, the argument goes, how can they prevent terror activity?

Dr David Murakami Wood, research chair in surveillance studies at Queen’s University, Ontario, points out that this idea is entirely false. US Department of Justice reports have never identified a single terror attack prevented by mass surveillance, he says, admitting that targeted spying is more effective: “Watchlists and targeting work better than the dragnet approach.”

Bernal agrees that more privacy helps rather than hinders security, though he’s not sure we will ever convince everyone of that fact: “The intervention of companies such as Apple will help. We need more of that, [but] we also need more ‘tech-savvy’ politicians. But again, sadly, there’s little sign of this happening.”

Connectivity, but at what price?

What else will dominate the privacy debate in the coming years? Smart cities, smart homes and the internet of things (IoT) may well boost efficiency, healthcare and convenience, but they’re not good news for privacy.

“For any of this to function, enormous amounts of data need to be collected on the location of everything about users,” notes Murakami Wood. “This creates huge amounts of extra data, in addition to the data we’re already used to giving out for various reasons.” If we don’t challenge that, he says, “surveillance becomes an underpinning logic on everything”.

So far, few of us will be concerned; many don’t yet use smart home devices (many of the products leave much to be desired). Murakami Wood believes many such products will indeed fail, but we shouldn’t assume that’s enough to protect privacy. “We will be continually disappointed by such devices, but that doesn’t mean the data won’t be collected,” he warns, also noting that struggling companies who hold piles of our personal data could prove an extra threat to privacy, as they’ll seek to monetise it to prop up their failing business: “If you have a combination of massive amounts of data collection and a failure of the business model, you’ve actually got a worse potential world than if it worked properly.”

Shifting the baseline

Another issue that we must consider is how privacy relates to children and how the idea is being eroded. “Kids are being increasingly put under surveillance of all kinds,” Murakami Wood says, pointing to Google’s push into education with Chromebooks and the increasing use of management and learning apps.

This is a problem because children will learn to accept a lack of privacy as

normal. “It has a broader social educative effect that it’s normal for everyone to grow up under complete surveillance, which means the baseline that people will have growing up is a world in which surveillance is completely normal – that there’s nothing weird about this; it’s just how things are,” he says.

Even as adults, we must be careful that erosion of privacy doesn’t become the norm. “We always wonder when lines are going to be crossed, but we never see those lines being crossed because our baseline is always shifting,” Murakami Wood adds. “Our expectations are always relating to what there is now and we can’t imagine how things were previously. We lose the ability to know what we used to have … we can’t conceive the amount of privacy we used to have.”

Will people ever care about privacy?

We may be more aware that privacy has a cost, however not all of us are willing to pay for it. “People are slowly wising up to the fact that all these free online services come at a cost, as do all the wonderful marketing offers,” says Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at the University of Cambridge. “If they want privacy, it costs money, effort or both.”

David Emm, principal security researcher at Kaspersky, suggests that we need not stop using such technology or services, but to be more aware as consumers to potential problems by reading terms, examining settings and carefully choosing what to opt in to: “Go into it with your eyes open rather than blundering into it.”

To convince people to take precautions, the arguments need to be more convincing than privacy for privacy’s sake. “Just appealing to privacy doesn’t speak to people,” says Murakami Wood. “We are always bemoaning the loss of privacy, but appealing to privacy itself is not enough. That doesn’t seem to inspire people. One of the lessons for anyone concerned about this is that we need to find other ways of talking about what we’re losing and find more positive ways of bringing it back.”

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