Let’s make one thing perfectly clear: You cannot have privacy online.
It’s the nature of the beast. Sure, you can encrypt and make it difficult, but that’s about the same as any lock on any door — it only keeps the decent people honest. Those determined to get in will do so. Privacy isn’t about secrecy; it’s simply keeping your clothes on among folks with no business seeing your naked body, or in contexts where nudity is a problem.
Let me settle the burning question in the minds of those seeking any chink in the armor: I find nudity annoying for the most part. I don’t care for public displays; there’s something fundamentally disturbing about that. We might debate how much is too much, but the principle stands on its own. A private unveiling in one thing; open flashing is revolting. When you spend time exploring your own heart and learning your own secret desires, it’s easier to come to terms with God’s moral demands and actually live them.
The metaphor of nudity applies widely. When you engage the Internet, you are virtually nude. It’s not a matter of keeping your real identity secret; you couldn’t carry it into the virtual world in the first place. It’s not like the real world in that respect. You are whom you are at the moment, but your identity will always be an artifact of those you encounter, and those who pay any attention at all to you. That can easily mean a very real friendship with the person on the other end, but only if some element of your online presence is transparent in terms of you having a clear vision of why you are there as a human being.
You have to meet the virtual world on its own terms. A basic fact: If you digitize it, anyone can see it. Transmission across the network is de facto exposure. You have to adjust your thinking and your reactions; you have to adopt the cultural mythology that belongs to the virtual world. You may have noticed we have made no conscious effort to do this, so it’s currently shaped by those who built the darn thing and keep it working. Those folks are seldom average Joes and Janes; they are mostly some truly different folks. Many of them are total social failures in meat space and found themselves at home in virtual reality. A significant portion of them are seeking revenge for what they view as persecution in meat space for being different. Along with them is a fat layer of predatory marketers who recognize no boundaries in the first place, but they can get away with even more online than they could in meat space.
While the predatory souls currently have serious leverage in things online, they can’t keep it if the rest of us learn our way around. Once we adopt the a proper understanding of how things work, we can build a new civilization consciously. We don’t have to let it take shape in the hands of those hostile to our interests. It certainly won’t shape itself. But we do have to think about this and stop imagining we can drag our meat space habits and thinking into cyberspace.
For example, given the complete insanity of imagining anything I do online could be private, I simply shape my activities to match the reality. In one sense, I could care less if the NSA or some other entity has a bug on my computer, capturing my behavior and looking over my shoulder, as it were. As long as their activities don’t interfere with mine, it’s a fine coexistence. I come to the Net for a certain purpose and calling. I’ll fight to keep that purpose alive, but there’s little I can do about snooping. So by operating consciously in transparency, there is no threat. I need only fight the advertising malware and other hindrances, and would never pretend what I do is private.
Keep your privates offline.
It’s really that simple. If you are vapid enough to show your genitals in public, then feel free to send your naked selfies across the Net. Just don’t complain when they are held up to the public eye. Our problem is not the lack of network security; our problem is our moral insecurity and our refusal to understand reality.
