Our life is unique and precious. And that value does not depend on where we choose to live our life.

We do not tend to leave our front door open all day and night. Neither do we just let any old stranger enter our home to see what we do, what we eat, how many of us live there, what we read, what we watch on TV, or which football team we support. We would not allow any stranger to follow us 24 hours a day to see where we are going, where we work, or whom we meet up with.

We do not allow these things to happen because we value our privacy. In the real world, we value privacy, and it is our right to do so.

We do not have two lives, an analog and a digital life. There is only one life, and it is increasingly digital. The pandemic is teaching us some very harsh lessons, forcing us to value those things we had failed to appreciate beforehand. For weeks on end, it forced us to seek refuge in our homes. However, contrary to what happened in previous pandemics, life did not grind to a halt this time. Life shifted to the network. We all realized (adults and children, women and men, people and companies) that we could work, entertain ourselves, educate ourselves, shop or make orders from our homes. We lost our fear of the digital world because we had no choice but to do so. We burned our bridges. Every week of lock-down, we leapfrogged a whole year in our migration towards the digital world, our journey to the cloud.

Yet, if we value privacy in our lives and consider it our right and our lives have become significantly more digital, why do we consent to things in the digital world that we would never tolerate in the analog world? Does privacy have less value in the digital world? Or are we perhaps less aware of its value?

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Our life is unique and precious. And that value does not depend on where we choose to live our life.