Just how private are our lives anymore, and does anybody?care?

China is now a place where everything you do in virtually any part of a city is picked up by a camera, analyzed and then processed by the authorities.

This is not news. Nobody is even surprised or shocked by this anymore. We now accept that this is how things are: an extreme version of what’s going on everywhere. In India, which developed the first large-scale biometric identification system, Aadhaar, says it is now incorporating a facial recognition system into its huge database that will be deployed everywhere, in cities, in airports and by the police. Singapore has installed cameras with facial recognition systems in 110,000 street lamps and other posts throughout the city, while France’s interior ministry is preparing to launch an ambitious national facial recognition identification program.

In several countries around the world, the progressive sophistication of facial recognition technologies is being used by governments to create de facto surveillance states where everybody is monitored. Facial recognition is a moral dilemma, something that nobody knows how to regulate. While the European Union or some US cities have imposed significant restrictions on its use, other cities such as London are increasingly using it, despite innumerable problems with mis-recognition, as some employees of Amazon have highlighted with its Rekognition program or with its Ring cameras, now quickly popping out all over the place.

The problem with regulating things such as facial recognition or privacy in general is defining what it means in the first place. Few of us are prepared to give the matter much thought. As a result, we tend toward a kind of techno-fatalism: facial recognition is an inescapable technological development, it is already here, and we should probably accept it because it will soon be no longer just in the hands of the authorities, but deployed in stores and supermarkets. We have evolved into surveillance societies and must come to terms with it: after all “I have nothing to hide, so I have nothing to fear”. Either that, or withdraw from society and head for the hills, running the risk of being seen as the latest Unabomber by the authorities.

There are even people who see the question merely in terms of what data is worth, and to what extent privacy can somehow be sold. We might not give away our biometric data for nothing, but if doing so means avoiding time-consuming hassles at airports or government buildings, then why not? The moment privacy becomes something that only some can afford, we have a major problem.

Our privacy is not like any other data. It has — and rightly so — a special and specific importance. Only criminals are systematically denied their privacy. Privacy is important because it is the ultimate power, and consequently, when it is taken away from us, we lose that power. The prospect of losing one’s privacy has a sobering effect on anybody thinking dissent, and I’m not talking here about committing acts of violence or rebellion, but simply questioning the status quo.

The scenes we are witnessing in Hong Kong, where people are protesting against the introduction of technologies and laws that would make it easier to monitor people’s movements, should give us pause for thought. The development of digital money, China’s new electronic currency or projects such as Facebook’s Libra should lead us to think about the evolution of the world we are heading towards: do we really want to live in societies where the authorities not only know who we are, where we live, what we do, who we see or how much we spend, but now have so much information about us that anything we do can be seen as potentially suspicious? As Cardinal Richelieu supposedly said, “give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, and I will find something in them which will hang him.” In a surveillance society, we are all guilty, guilty of anything that the authorities decide we’re guilty of.

I’ve just finished reading Edward Snowden’s “Permanent Record”, which provides some chilling insight into where we’re headed. In my new book, “Viviendo en el futuro” (“Living in the future”), which I hope will soon be available in English, I dedicate a chapter to the evolution of privacy. Privacy is a commons, and we must defend it vigilantly. New privacy scenarios such as the one defined by California’s privacy law, inspired by European legislation, has a lot of sense: everything is worthwhile when it comes to increasing the collective consciousness in this matter.

Individually, we may decide to exchange our privacy for any or all of the reasons mentioned above. But collectively, we must defend it since it defines who we are as a society and the resources we have available to govern our own destiny. The problem is that most people do not fully understand what privacy is, while the authorities are unable to defend something whose importance they fail to understand, while at the same time, they are tempted by the idea of controlling , nor it. As a result, we’re not having the debate we need to be having about a subject of such vital importance. If we leave the decisions to the companies developing the technology and the governments who are managing its use, then we cannot be surprised if we sleepwalk into one of the most important changes our societies will ever have experienced.

(En espa?ol, aquí)