How the Privacy Pundits got this one wrong, and the consumer expectation is unfair

The cry is getting louder and louder. Evil Tech Giants! Creepy Surveillance! Google knows everything about us! Facebook is snooping on us! They listen to everything! Google Pizza! They are evil! We have lost our Digital Privacy! Let’s get regulations in! Let’s break them up! Louder! Louder!

And yet, how the pundits and the privacy warriors got it all wrong.

 

Can Your Home be a Private Place to Someone Else?

Bijaei explains - If I come to your house and keep a lot of my personal things in your living room, you will see it. It’s your house! Can I expect you to not look at my personal things or can I expect to get privacy around it from you? Not possible. IT’S YOUR HOUSE and you will see my things if it’s in your house. I have willingly come and kept my stuff in your house. Then, expecting to get privacy from you or expecting you to not see my things when they are in your house is an unrealistic expectation and an unfair ask.

But isn’t that what all of us are expecting and demanding on the internet?! Let’s look at some bare basics.

What is the Internet?

At the basic level, the Internet is a whole bunch of servers connected on a common network and working on a common syntax. A few 100 million servers connected, all with various types of applications installed in them to provide you with different products or services. When you type facebook.com into your browser’s URL field, you are practically going into a server and accessing an application inside it that facilitates social interaction for you and over two billion other people. This application reads into a database that it owns and maintains, and smoothly facilitates your social interactions on the internet.

Who Controls the Internet?

Whoever invested money and set up those millions of servers, and then developed the applications in them to facilitate various services for you have significant control over what goes on on the internet. You and I have barely any power. We don’t decide the services, features, process flows, database, etc. We decide nothing, actually. We just go there and use those smoothly functioning applications, get some dopamine triggered in our brains and go back there for another fill... again and again. And in the process, we dump our personal data there – photos, videos, documents, chats, interactions, likes, dislikes, preferences, personal secrets, health data, intimate information, and everything.

Whichever organization that invested money and set up those millions of servers, applications and databases where all your personal data is stored can and will analyze your data, understand you deeply and influence your behavior for their commercial benefit. That’s the legit and transparent business model, by default.

 

Privacy on the Internet

The demand for Privacy, while your data is lying on their servers, applications and databases then seems so misplaced. So unfair and impractical. How can I expect or demand any privacy when I have – in the name of social networking, news, entertainment, eCommerce, communication, etc – willingly gone to their servers, accessed their applications and dumped my data there in their databases? If I keep my personal things in your living room, you are going to see it. No point complaining that I don’t get any privacy from you in your house.

For real privacy, we need to think out of the existing structure of the Internet. We need to look for a real, structural solution. Till then, we can complain but to no avail.

Houm Technology Private Limited - Structural Solution

Houm Technology, founded by Bijaei Jayaraj, offers consumers across the world an innovative consumer internet product that is focused on creating real privacy on the internet via the revolutionary concept of ‘private ownership on the internet by the end consumer’ – a first of its kind! Houm enables each consumer to build and actually own a private place on the internet – a private digital home with 100GB storage that no other person or system or bot (including Houm Technology) can access. You can create your personal private network inside your digital home and communicate privately with people via Chat, Voice or Video Calls in absolute privacy. You can build a Houm for yourself and experience the product at www.houm.me or Android or iOS.

 

Disclaimer : Above mentioned article is a Consumer connect initiative, This article is a paid publication and does not have journalistic/editorial involvement of IDPL, and IDPL claims no responsibility whatsoever.