Member-only story
Privacy Never Existed
Much has been said recently about not having devices such as the Amazon Alexa or Google Home in your home due to wanting to maintain your privacy. The same has been said of using Google or Bing as your search engine, using certain browsers or apps, and so forth. “But my privacy!” is the common refrain. Privacy, however, never existed.
Privacy is an illusion brought about by the rate at which information can spread. Today, a lot of information is at your fingertips. Information is a mere search query away. Not too many decades ago, a trip to the library was necessary to get certain information. The information was the same as today, it just took much longer to get and required more effort on your part to get it. Today, if I want to find out how much a particular house in my neighborhood sold for, I can look it up online. A few years ago, I would have had to either ask a real estate agent to look it up for me, or take a trip to the county courthouse to look at property records. The information is the same, but how quickly I could have it at my fingertips has changed. Has any privacy been lost in the process? No. If it takes 10 seconds, ten minutes, or 10 hours but the information is the same, the privacy hasn’t changed.
I live in a Google household. As I sit here, a Google Home Mini sits about 18 inches away. There’s a Google Home in the master bedroom. There’s a Mini in the master…
