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Privacy Is the New Digital Divide
Keeping your data secure is becoming a luxury good — and the poor risk becoming second-class online citizens
The modern understanding of personal privacy was first defined in the landmark 1890 essay “The Right to Privacy.” Its authors, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis (the latter of whom eventually joined the Supreme Court), were wealthy American lawyers concerned about how the paparazzi of the time were deploying a powerful new technology called a camera. “Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the next step which must be taken for the protection of the person,” they wrote. “Instantaneous photographs” and “numerous mechanical devices” threatened to gather and disseminate individuals’ personal information. In response, they argued that everyone had a “right to be let alone.”
The Warren-Brandeis essay is notable for broadening the legal concept of privacy to include the more nebulous sense of what our personal privacy really feels like. Their argument has only become more relevant over the nearly 130 years since. The power and ubiquity of the internet has birthed privacy infringement on a scale that would have been unimaginable to the Victorians. The 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that the personal data of 87 million Facebook users was used to design psychologically targeted news and propaganda campaigns to sway voters in key elections in the United States, the U.K., and Mexico.
But that scandal can be seen as just one brick in a wall of mistrust that has built up between citizens and the technology they use, especially when the service, like Facebook, makes money by selling advertising targeted to its users.
In response, a new wave of companies is monetizing the new opportunity of offering paid-for services with heightened privacy. The “right to be let alone” is now a right that can be paid for. Gartner forecasts that worldwide spending on consumer security software will reach upwards of $6.6 billion in 2019. These services include Safe Shepherd, a privacy protection service that scrubs user information from marketing databases; TrustedID, which helps to detect risk of identity theft and control the use of personal information; and myriad startups offering encrypted email, messaging, and…
