Privacy: Worth sacrificing in the age of Big Data?

“Someday, a young girl will look up into her father’s eyes and ask, ‘Daddy, what was privacy?’” said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. The revelation last week that the government has been secretly harvesting our phone numbers and vacuuming up online data has opened America’s eyes to the astonishing erosion of privacy in modern life. The idea that a U.S. citizen’s movements and activity are none of the government’s business now seems like a “quaint relic of an earlier age.” We live in the age of Big Data, when our online activity, emails, phone calls, even our daily movements are recorded by a vast private and government surveillance network. “History suggests there is no turning back.” My fellow Americans, this is your “wake-up call,” said Conor Friedersdorf in TheAtlantic.com. We now know we live in “the most sophisticated surveillance state in human history”—and yet where is the outrage, the demands for legislation to roll back these intrusions? “Has fear of terrorism done this to us? Apathy? Denial?”

Try sheer convenience, said Amy Webb in Slate.com. In the information age, privacy has become a kind of currency. We gladly hand over “deeply personal data” for the benefits that technology brings, from the credit card that records our purchases, to the smartphone that can track our movements, to the social networks that can expand our circle of friends, find jobs and mates, and broadcast our thoughts and values to the world. If that data is also used to keep us safe from terrorism, isn’t that a worthwhile trade-off? Let’s not forget that the Boston Marathon bombers were identified within hours of their attack, and before they could strike again, “precisely because we submit to constant surveillance.”

No wonder Americans are finding it hard to “decide how outraged to be,” said Joan Walsh in Salon.com. We know, deep down, that we are fully complicit in our loss of privacy; we’re reminded of our cooperation each time Google shows us an ad for something we searched for two hours ago, or Facebook changes its privacy settings yet again. That’s why so many people have been dismissively joking about what the National Security Agency knows about them. “We always knew, or suspected, all of this was possible—and went on doing it anyway.” The alternative is to give up cellphones, Facebook, Google, and the Internet, all of which are “so damn awesome.” What we didn’t fully realize, though, is that the Internet “is a surveillance state,” said Ross Douthat in The New York Times. As ex-CIA chief David Petraeus and his mistress recently discovered, “even the powerful can’t cover their tracks.” With technology racing forward and more and more data being siphoned into its servers, the government will “enjoy extraordinary, potentially tyrannical powers.” The trade-off seems acceptable most of the time. “Just make sure you don’t have anything to hide.”

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It doesn’t have to be this way, said Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes in NewRepublic.com. We are still the masters of “Big Data”—or at least we should be. If we don’t want to live in a world where “photos can be silently taken by a pair of eyeglasses,” or where a government agency can “peer into our homes at any moment without request,” we must resist it—and demand that laws and social norms protect us from such intrusions. “Humans create technology. Humans can control it.”

If we want to regain some control, we’d better act fast, said Charles C.W. Cooke in NationalReview.com. America was founded by people who believed that “liberty is an imperative,” even when its price is discomfort, danger, and yes—as Patrick Henry once noted—even death. The Fourth Amendment should ensure today just what it ensured in 1791: that absent some indication of criminal behavior, “Americans are not subject to casual government scrutiny.” Yet today, the government exploits our outsized fear of terrorism to argue that the ends justify the means. It already collects everyone’s metadata and installs cameras in public places, and will soon deploy drones over our towns and cities. To simply shrug at this and say “oh well” is “to embrace the tentacles of the state and, in the words of the poet Richard Brautigan, to welcome a country in which we are ‘all watched over by machines of loving grace.’ I will not stand for that. Will you?”