Google’s CEO said that you shouldn’t do things you don’t want people to find out about. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg thinks privacy is no longer a social good. The difference between what they say and what they do is absurd. Come to think of it, that we have to ask why privacy matters at all is pretty absurd. The good news is that journalist Glenn Greenwald, one of the people behind the Edward Snowden leaks, has some pretty good answers to that question.
There’s a common and dangerous idea that comes up frequently in debates about privacy. The idea is that we don’t actually need privacy…
Here’s why that idea is a problem.
Glenn Greenwald devised a brilliant experiment to show why this is self-delusion.
To this day, no one has taken him up on that offer. And this gets to the core of why privacy matters.
Privacy is not just a right, but an essential check against social control.
