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Maximise human happiness vs Maximise human safety

“Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety,” Benjamin Franklin once said, “deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” But if Franklin were alive today, where would he draw the line? Is the freedom to send an encrypted text message essential? How about the right to keep our browsing history private? What is the sweet spot between our need to be left alone and our desire to keep potential criminals from communicating in secret?

In an age where fear of terrorism is high in the public consciousness, governments are likely to err on the side of safety. Over the past decade, the authorities have been pushing for – and getting – greater powers of surveillance than they have ever had, all in the name of national security.

The downsides are not immediately obvious. After all, you might think you have nothing to hide. But most of us have perfectly legal secrets we’d rather someone else didn’t see. And although the chances of the authorities turning up to take you away in a black SUV on the basis of your WhatsApp messages are small in free societies, the chances of insurance companies raising your premiums are not.

The Faustian bargain taking place in our interactions with tech companies has gone more or less unnoticed. We hand over our data and in return get to use apps and websites without charge, with virtually no insight into how our information gets used, or who it gets sold on to. People have been declaring the privacy debate over for 20 years, says Paul Bernal at the University of East Anglia Law School in Norwich, UK. In fact, it’s a debate we’ve never actually had. And the ethical issues at its heart are getting more urgent, not less. “What this is really about is interfering with people’s lives,” says Bernal.

“It is morally wrong to give autonomy to robots that cannot think morally”

Recent allegations of political manipulation in the Brexit and Trump campaigns give a glimpse of the dangers. According to reports, UK company Cambridge Analytica used psychometric profiling based on publicly available data, including Facebook “likes”, to present finely tuned personalised ads to undecided voters. It’s not clear they had any effect, but the method is based on research that shows you can profile people surprisingly accurately using just public social media activity.

And while we don’t have to use any of these services, the likes of Facebook, Google and Amazon are so dominant that it has become hard to find alternatives. In many newly connected countries there aren’t any. Myanmar, for example, was largely offline until a few years ago; now it has one of the highest proportions of Facebook users in the world. For most people there, Facebook is the internet and its approach to privacy the norm. “Ethically, it’s a critical issue,” says Bernal.

Of course, data-fuelled technology could also bring enormous benefits, improving the way we treat disease, manage energy use and run communities. But the issue is who gets our data, and what do we want them to do with it? Personal data is knowledge and knowledge is power. “In the end, it comes down to a slow erosion of our autonomy,” says Bernal. “We need to step back and talk about what kind of control we’re giving away. What are the final consequences and are they acceptable?”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Should we… Abandon privacy online?”