Your Privacy Is Gone. You Just Don't Know It Yet

Your Privacy Is Gone. Yous But Don't Know It Yet

LAS VEGAS — Our current notion of privacy has become obsolete in the internet historic period, author and professional speaker Richard Thieme told the DEF CON 25 hacker briefing here this weekend.

Credit: Akkharat Jarusilawong — (Image credit: Akkharat Jarusilawong)

"Privacy is nonexistent. It doesn't exist in the way that information technology existed," Thieme said. "The 20th century framework in which we call up about these things is finer ending."

Privacy advocates and others who deny this reality, he argued, only make the transition process more than painful. Nosotros instead must admit that privacy equally we know information technology is lost and endeavor to create new concepts for a new era.

"At the centre of internet culture is a force that wants to know everything virtually y'all. We think of privacy every bit a human right, simply we alive in a Facebook age, when all that matters is publicity." - Richard Thieme, author and commentator.

Our entire concept of privacy, Thieme explained, is a product of the printing printing, which popularized literacy and intellectual idea, and of the Industrial Revolution, which fabricated information technology possible for a person of modest means to have personal space. The notion of privacy is an abstract extension of that personal space.

"Before the Industrial Revolution, you had no privacy," he said. "Y'all all lived in one room. You had no rights."

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The internet revolution that began in the 1990s is changing order simply as fundamentally as the printing printing, Thieme said. Torrents of data flow across the world with no regard to national borders. Technology companies pick and choose which laws to follow among the countries in which they operate, moving data from one jurisdiction to another as it suits them. People put personal information online for billions of strangers to read.

"At the centre of internet civilization is a strength that wants to know everything virtually you," Thieme said. "We think of privacy equally a human correct, but we live in a Facebook age, when all that matters is publicity."

The notion of the individual is an thought that no longer applies in an age when ideas, words and images are transmitted, copied and contradistinct without attribution, when copyright laws have become meaningless and when people seek immediate approval for their every idea and deed from thousands of social-media contacts. The whole world has go a small village, in which anybody gossips, trades ideas and knows anybody else'southward concern.

"Privacy has meaning simply for an individual. And nosotros are no longer individuals," Thieme said. "We believe in ourselves, simply our selves are no longer our selves. We are not the same people who we one time were."

Yet few people over 25 — those who grew up before the internet — can see that yet, argues Thieme. They are fighting to preserve the fashion they were raised to think of themselves, and cannot comprehend that the very concept of individual privacy no longer applies.

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"The language of the past is inadequate to depict what we have go through technology," Thieme said. "The move to digitize everything has made existing societal patterns liquid. Yet our minds keep the changes small in social club to deal with it."

Younger people don't have this problem, he said.

"Kids don't think of privacy the aforementioned fashion, because they grew up without it," Thieme said. "Kids today don't know what it ways to 'go along the internet' because they're always on the cyberspace."

The way forward, he said, is to stop fighting a lost boxing and surrender to the fact that privacy is gone. Merely then can we begin to redefine what information technology means to exist a person in the internet age.

"Privacy advocates — righteous and sincere — are fighting a rear-guard action confronting reality, and reality always wins," Thieme said. "We just accept to have that it's real."

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Paul Wagenseil is a senior editor at Tom'south Guide focused on security and privacy. He has also been a dishwasher, fry cook, long-haul driver, lawmaking monkey and video editor. He's been rooting around in the data-security space for more than than 15 years at FoxNews.com, SecurityNewsDaily, TechNewsDaily and Tom's Guide, has presented talks at the ShmooCon, DerbyCon and BSides Las Vegas hacker conferences, shown upwards in random TV news spots and fifty-fifty chastened a panel discussion at the CEDIA home-technology conference. You tin follow his rants on Twitter at @snd_wagenseil.