Privacy isn’t there for the purpose of protecting people who want to do wrong. Privacy is a more than a random civil right: it is a safeguard in a democratic society, a crucial safety valve against unjust laws that shouldn’t be able to be enforced. As such, it is not an individual benefit as much as it is a collective one: a mechanism that benefits everybody, even those who don’t use it.

Most people understand vaccinations. We protect ourselves from infection by preparing our immune system against pathogens (viruses, bacteria) by showing disabled versions of that pathogen to the immune system, so our immune system recognizes it and is prepared when and if a live attack happens from that pathogen.

But the importance doesn’t stop there, at the individual level. Vaccination isn’t merely an individual benefit, it’s a collective benefit. If vaccinations are in proper place across a population, they benefit even those who – for whatever reason – were not vaccinated. If a pathogen is unable to take hold in a population, because most are vaccinated, then a contagion will never break out, which benefits everybody.

Therefore, vaccination is not an individual benefit (something that only becomes those who were vaccinated), but a collective benefit – it benefits everybody.

Privacy works the same way. It was never “only for those who had something to hide”.

Laws are changed as a result of changing behavior and changing acceptances in the population at large, and very rarely the other way around. (The late-in-coming cannabis debate and legalization is an example of this, as is marriage equality.) This means that laws are changed as a result of people who are breaking the law for one of many reasons – they could see it as unjust, illegitimate, out of sync with public acceptance, or break the law just because they want to. The reason doesn’t really matter.

To put an example in cleartext: if people who were born homosexual hadn’t insisted on being who they were, despite it being illegal, laws would not have changed to make it legal. Make them legal. This required privacy, and it didn’t just have an individual benefit for a few lawbreakers – it had the collective benefit of repealing unjust laws, something that could not have happened without privacy.

There are many examples like this, and is one of the key reasons we need privacy. A nation that can enforce all of its laws, lacking any privacy at all, stops dead in its tracks since values are no longer allowed to change and evolve. Most people today who look at what our values were 50 years ago are horrified; is there any reason to believe people 50 years out won’t think the same of today? And yet, people justify violations of privacy with “rounding up criminals”.

If we had had today’s surveillance in place 50 years ago, homosexuality would still be criminal. As would marriages between people of different shades of skin. It was only because of privacy that these laws could be questioned, debated, and changed. If “rounding up criminals” wasn’t acceptable as excuse then, why should it be now?

We need privacy. Not for the individuals breaking laws, not for the people who have something to hide, but for the collective benefit of a few people being able to question norms and standards that maybe are just plain wrong, which benefits all of us.

We need privacy to evolve as a society.

In the lack of government providing privacy, it remains your own responsibility.