“Privacy” is something of a buzzword as of the last decade or so, as more and more scandalous data leaks and online threats appear in the news. I was born right around the time when the internet was hitting that exponential curve really hard and everything became increasingly internet-based. I grew up without any idea of what a life without this handy tool would be like—and why would I want to? My fact-checker tendency could never.

me, age 8, messing with dad's stuff

When I started running across these Terms of Service contracts as a kid, I would always ask my dad; he works in IT and I always deferred to his judgement before clicking anything I didn’t understand. He’d usually give me some version of, “Um, *sigh,* yeah, just agree,” and I’d click confidently onward, comforted by the go-ahead of the smartest person I knew. Little did I know that his response was an over-consolidated product of his knowledge about our online privacy, or lack thereof, about which I would not go on to learn until much later.

Being the apathetic consumer that I’ve thus far established myself to be, even after discovering some of the disturbing facts of the Terms of Service issue, I picked my battles in a similar fashion to my father. My need or desire to use an online service almost always outweighs my hesitation to sign a contract I’m not likely to understand and even less likely to read. I check the box and move on, choosing not to think about it in an effort to preserve what little ignorance born-bliss I still have. In doing so, I’ve likely opened myself to many an online threat, but, as I see it, if a massive medical records storage company can lose all my data to “unknown entities” and just send me a mass announcement effectively saying, “oops,” then how am I expected to protect myself in a meaningful manner?

Luckily, this issue is very well known and there are resources to help lazy people like me, such as Terms of Service; Didn’t Read, which breaks down Terms of Service agreements for popular sites and rates them on their relative shadiness, and haveibeenpwned.com, which lets you know if your email address has been involved in data breaches (this site sounds like a potential scam itself, but it’s actually safe and endorsed by many reputable sources including the New Jersey Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Cell (NJCCIC) and the good people of Reddit.)

The TED Talks included in the class material as well as the ones I watched for further data collection left me with a few distinct messages:

1.         We do not have control of our data and therefore do not have control of our lives.
2.          It should be the responsibility of corporations providing internet and online services to make their Terms of Service linguistically accessible and more respectful.
3.         Since these corporations aren’t going to voluntarily respect our data, it’s fallen to us to take steps to protect ourselves.

Our data didn’t used to belong to every service with which we interacted. Kade Crockford used in their TED Talk the analogy of curtains, fences, and door locks for how we used to protect our privacy. Online, we aren’t offered the luxury of digital curtains, and anyone can peek through our windows or, worse, plaster posters around town sharing our private information with strangers. In Darieth Chisolm’s Talk, she discusses her experience with ‘revenge porn,’ which she more accurately describes as ‘digital domestic violence.’ Her agonizing struggle to have the materials taken down and get just punishment for the worthless waste of space that posted her intimate photos online was far too complex, exhausting, and expensive than it should have been.

Chisolm’s description of the lack of legal measures in place for our government to handle these kinds of situations are infuriating and only underscores the growing sense that not only are we not in control of our data, but the government has zero interest in helping us protect it. In fact, they profit from our lack of online control: Christopher Soghoian explains in his Talk that our phones, back in the day, were always wired first and foremost for wiretapping. Since the first days of telephones, the government has had their ear to the door of civilians’ private lives, regardless of criminal suspicion.

I consume an unholy amount of true crime and consider myself pretty familiar with common tactics and tools used by local police, as well as the FBI, in criminal investigations. Sometimes a cell tower dump, pinging a cellphone location, or old-school wiretapping is the key to brining a missing person home and the linchpin for the case against a violent criminal. In those cases, I always find myself glad to know that police are using these tools responsibly to put horrible people away. In some way, it almost feels dutiful, patriotic, even, to know that my privacy is an illusion for the sake of catching murderers and rapists. Crockford and Soghoian both touched on this, emphasizing the message that safety and privacy are not mutually exclusive. We’ve been led to believe that in order to keep us safe, the government needs us to forfeit our privacy, and by doing so we serve a greater good. They both insist that this is not true, and Soghoian even recommends specific apps, such as FaceTime, iMessage, and WhatsApp for a more encrypted communication experience.