Privacy scholar Daniel Solove: "We're entering a dark age"
I was happy to speak with Daniel Solove on Techtonic this week about his new book On Privacy and Technology. It’s a short, readable book covering all the major issues around privacy, technology, and the law.
Solove is the most-cited law professor in the field of privacy and technology, so he’s the right person to give us this tour.
Listen to the interview:
Episode page with links and listener comments (click “Pop-up player” to listen)
I started the interview by asking Solove about the “nothing to hide” argument – that is, the reason many people give for not being worried about intrusive surveillance. You’ve probably heard it: “I don’t mind if they know everything about me, because I have nothing to hide.”
As Solove points out, such a response misses the point entirely about what’s at stake in a society devolving into a surveillance state. For starters, individual data is being tracked and analyzed largely without citizens’ knowledge or consent, which first harms the marginal and vulnerable but eventually creates negative effects for everyone else. But that’s just the beginning.
The more systemic issue, Solove says, is that privacy is a fundamental requirement for a free and democratic society. Conversely, the loss of privacy creates the conditions for autocrats and totalitarian ideologies to take over.
Solove generally had an upbeat and positive attitude throughout our conversation (as, I suppose, one needs to maintain for sanity’s sake while writing 10 books on the threats to privacy). But when he described the risks to democracy due to surveillance, and the vital importance of defending privacy, his tone changed. He said:
We’re entering a dark age where those lessons are being lost. Unfortunately, I see the future as not very bright. We’re seeing the kind of authoritarian, totalitarian style come back.
I don’t know about you, but when one of the world’s leading experts on surveillance says “the future is not very bright,” I feel a chill.
I’ll get to some good news, or at least a sliver of hope, in a moment. But first let me deliver another dose of bad news from Solove’s book: the odds are stacked heavily against anyone who wants to fight back. In particular, the judicial system is tilted against citizens. As Solove points out in multiple examples, the courts tend to favor the interests of large corporations over citizens, even in egregious situations.
Solove tells the story of a credit agency that mistakenly, and falsely, labelled someone a terrorist – simply because the citizen had the same name as someone on a terrorist list. Did the credit agency bother to do the research to make sure they were labelling the right person a terrorist? Of course not – that would take an extra 10 or 15 minutes of work. And once the error was pointed out (as the citizen, surely frantic about their prospects for employment and home ownership with this mistake in their dossier, contacted the company about the error) did the credit company take any action to correct the record? Also no. After all, flipping a bit in a digital dossier must require the concentrated effort of two, maybe even three minutes!
Even more pertinent is what happened when the citizen sued. The judge ruled in favor of the credit company, saying that the citizen hadn’t been harmed: it was just bad data, but the data itself hadn’t (yet) caused material harm, so the company could not be forced to correct their mistake, let alone suffer any penalty.
Here again, much like the threats of surveillance, it’s not just a case of an individual citizen being harmed. As Solove writes:
Though the law often focuses intently on individual harm, privacy harms tend to be societal in nature.
And the cause of the problem extends beyond judges who favor corporations. Solove puts it this way:
If there’s a villain in the story, it’s the law’s role . . . in the loss of privacy, the primary culprit is the legal scaffolding of the modern information economy.
Thus our task, and our sliver of hope, reside in the small matter of remaking the legal scaffolding of our entire economy. Great.
I want to emphasize that I agree with Solove. Everything I’ve read over the past decade on privacy, and the many interviews I’ve conducted on Techtonic, all align with what Solove warns about in his book:
Technology – as it is deployed today by unethical Big Tech monopolies – is accelerating the destruction of our privacy, and by extension our democracy;
Those same tech companies enjoy unchecked power, allowing them to “break things” with no compunction or guardrails of any kind;
The court system tends to favor corporate interests over citizens, even in egregious cases that obviously should be decided in citizens’ interest;
The law itself is written in a way that favors corporate interests, and laws that could be written to address the problem are unlikely to pass;
Our current government is not poised to take on these issues and, to the contrary, is sliding toward authoritarianism;
In the meantime citizens are being told to self-manage their own privacy (configuring privacy settings and reading terms and conditions documents), an impossible task for anyone, including – he says – a privacy expert like Solove himself.
With corporations running uncontrolled, and the government at best asleep and at worst complicit, we have few options. Solove – and once again I agree – names one possible next step: we, the citizens, have to begin the arduous work of building something better. Vote in better representatives; get involved in our communities; and above all, gain more awareness about what tech companies are doing and what’s at stake. Hence my own work, trying to raise the alarm and teach people about what is happening in tech – through this newsletter and my Creative Good community, which I hope you will join.
Again I’d recommend the interview with Daniel Solove (stream the show or see the episode page) and, if you’d like to dive in further, read his book.
Until next time,
-mark
Mark Hurst, founder, Creative Good
Email: mark@creativegood.com
Podcast/radio show: techtonic.fm
Follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon