This post, authored by Alex Klaushofer, is republished with permission from The Daily Sceptic
Do you ever hear a voice, hissing and persuasive like the snake which allegedly talked Eve into the Fall of Man, saying things like: “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear. It’s progress – part of modern life. Go on, give us your personal information. Oh, and your fingerprints. And an iris scan. You might as well. In any case, it’s inevitable. There’s nothing you can do.”
This is the voice of anti-privacy, the means by which governments, corporations and tech platforms persuade us to hand over levels of personal information unthinkable until very recently. It’s a voice that’s got louder and more insistent as those in control of our data have realised that digitalisation opens the door to previously undreamed-of levels of money and power.
Maybe, like me, you’ve become somewhat immune to that voice and hear both desperation and the desire to dominate in its tones. You’ve already had worrying glimpses of the uses to which your personal information could be put and you can see how, collected en masse and harnessed to new state powers, public data could create a system of control never before seen on earth. At the same time, you hear the whisperings of the anti-privacy voice around you as your fellow citizens repeat its casuistic deceptions. Sometimes it sounds like Mephistopheles offering a deal: “If you supply Google with data, we’ll give you a free email… if you get a loyalty card, you can pay ‘member’s prices’… if you install a smart meter, we might reduce your energy bills.”
The sibilant voice of anti-privacy masks the curious inversion that is taking place. Since the earliest days of the internet, we’ve been told to protect our data from bad actors such as financial scammers, hackers, identity thieves and geopolitical baddies. We are repeatedly warned against giving personal information unless we are absolutely sure who will be using it and how. We’ve been urged to abide by GDPR, put privacy policies on our websites and use tools such as Virtual Private Networks to encrypt our data. Apple, my laptop provider of choice since the early 2000s, has made privacy central to its brand, with protections built into its operating systems and a policy of not selling data to third parties.
Yet suddenly we’re being told we must hand over personal information to organisations linked to networks of unknown parties. There’s talk of restrictions on VPNs to stop people from getting round the identity checks necessary for a ban on social media for children. Such restrictions would only apply to ordinary citizens: since most organisations use VPNs, it would be privacy as usual for government bodies. This fact makes the terms of the new deal crystal clear: what’s ours is theirs and what’s theirs remains their own.
Now Apple is happily betraying its privacy-preserving brand. In March, owners of iPhones and tablets were suddenly required to submit personal information in order to verify their ages, with internet access on their device automatically downgraded if they didn’t. It so happened that the day after the news broke I had an errand to run in Apple’s flagship London store. The employee I spoke to knew nothing about the developments that were causing outrage in many quarters but thought that age verification would be “good for the children”.
All the while, the principle of medical confidentiality is being violated as our health data is shared and sold. The news that the NHS in England has given Palantir unlimited access to identifiable patient information is just the tip of a giant iceberg. This is the second major medical data grab in recent years, the first coming under the cover of Covid as information from GP practices was transferred to NHS Digital. At that point, if you knew about the data transfer, you could opt out. But this time there is no opt-out – even if, as Medical Confidential points out, you use private healthcare. Your medical information has simply been taken.
The anti-privacy monster is not so much a single snake as a hydra-headed serpent, jaws reaching out in all directions for whatever it can get. Increasingly, it relies on a Faustian pact that is much more stick than carrot: “if you don’t give us your identity documents, we won’t let you use social media. If you don’t give us your fingerprints, we won’t let you into the country.”
Do we understand what we’re doing as we rush headlong into a privacy-free world? Have we paused to consider the possible consequences of sharing quantities of sensitive information widely – or of making digital data the gatekeeper for access to vital goods and services? Have we wondered about the motivations for the inversion of privacy rights and who stands to benefit from the end of privacy?
Privacy has long been recognised as a fundamental right, a condition for democratic rights such as the freedom of expression, speech, association and movement. Privacy is foundational because it establishes a boundary that protects people from undue interference from the state or other third parties.
The right to privacy is enshrined in many countries’ constitutions and all major human rights instruments. Article 12 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights states: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”
Rights discourse, reflecting the complexity of modern life, breaks privacy down into different domains. Physical privacy is essential to the right to a personal life and the ability to make decisions without external pressure. Private spaces such as homes are protected so that people can explore ideas and develop relationships without fear of judgement or reprisal.
Bodily privacy underpins the right to make personal decisions about medical treatment and reproduction without coercion by medical authorities or the state. It’s therefore closely connected to informed consent and the principle of medical confidentiality – both cornerstones of Western healthcare.
Privacy of communication protects the right to keep personal correspondence and calls confidential. The secrecy of correspondence, enshrined in the constitutions of some European countries and carrying legal protection in the UK, guarantees that letters are not opened by government officials or third parties. In the digital age, these protections have been extended to electronic communications through legislation such as GDPR.
Information privacy, often called data protection, is designed to ensure individuals retain control of their personal information. This includes the right to decide what information is collected by third parties and how it is stored and shared. Biometrics constitute a special category of personal data, and explicit consent is required in order for the collection of information about someone’s physical traits to be lawful.
Here are a few specific examples of how, with very little public discussion or democratic scrutiny, privacy rights are being breached or eroded:
- In 2021, the Scottish Parliament passed the Hate Crime and Public Order Act, a new law allowing prosecution for comments or behaviour which “stir up hatred” made even in the privacy of the home
- Under the Crime and Policing Act 2026, police in England and Wales have been given new powers to enter and search private properties without a warrant
- The Covid Inquiry’s report on vaccines, Module 4, fails to acknowledge the ill-wisdom of vaccine mandates and passports, confirming the establishment’s shift away from informed consent and medical privacy
Those with historical knowledge sometimes like to point out that privacy rights were born of the individualism and property rights of the modern West. This idea presents privacy as a culturally-specific value which can easily be jettisoned, neatly coinciding with suggestions by Tony Blair and the World Economic Forum that it’s an obstacle on the path to a glorious technocratic future. But while this account of its historical origins has some truth, the human need for privacy goes far deeper. In pre-modern times, peeping through a keyhole or reading someone’s diary or correspondence was considered an intrusion into their personal affairs.
A close look at surveillance gets to the heart of why privacy matters.
Humans don’t like being watched. Our antipathy to surveillance is hard-wired: in books, films and everyday life being spied on is universally recognised as a sign of bad intentions. There doesn’t have to be any immediate danger in prospect: being watched holds within it the potential for bad action. It’s something to do with the asymmetrical relationship it creates between watcher and watched, the fact that surveillance gives the former the upper hand.
As Carissa Veliz points out in this insightful essay on digital technology: “Whoever surveils you gains more power over you by virtue of learning more about you, which makes it easier to predict what you’ll do next, and use that information in their favour. If I learn that you have gone to the movies every Monday night for the past year, I can use that information to predict that you’ll be at the movies next Monday night and plan to rob your house then.”
To put the matter in the simplest possible terms, surveillance is unfriendly.
Psychologists characterise a hostile disposition towards others as antagonistic. Antagonism lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from agreeableness, the personality trait which makes for harmonious interactions and cooperative relationships. An antagonistic attitude involves mistrust, placing the interests of the other as separate or opposed rather than shared. In the worst cases, those with an antagonistic mindset seek to exploit or dominate the other. When antagonism pervades the social and political sphere and the relationship between rulers and the ruled, the result is the darkest arrangements for collective living humans have devised.
It’s no coincidence that surveillance was central to Stalin’s Russia, the German Democratic Republic and other repressive regimes of the 20th Century. The desire to amplify the reach of human eyes and ears prompted technological innovation: the first CCTV system was developed by the Soviet Government in 1927 to monitor visitors entering the Kremlin. Techniques such as phone tapping, planting bugs and paper files seem primitive by today’s standards, but they did the job.
Doing research in Albania for the book that became Spyless in Tirana, I stood in the Museum of Secret Surveillance, stunned by the basic nature of the equipment in the glass cabinets. But, combined with a network of informants that involved as many as one in four of the population, the surveillance of the Hoxha regime created a culture of mistrust that persists to this day. “In communism, people were forced to spy even on their brother, and the wife on their husband,” Ana Stakaj of the Mary Ward Foundation told me. “[It] destroyed human values. So they learnt to keep things private and secret, especially thoughts.”
The fact so many former totalitarian countries have such museums underscores the lesson that should have been learnt by now. Surveillance corrodes relationships, creates anxiety, freezes spontaneity, stifles creativity and curtails authenticity. Contrariwise, privacy is essential to a life of dignity and autonomy. Without it, you can’t have freedom. As a liberal democracy that fought Nazi Germany, rejected communism and produced Nineteen Eighty-Four, we should have a deep, unshakeable understanding of this.
And yet in the Britain of the 2020s, a system of digital surveillance is being created for every area of life. The citizenry is given many “reasons” for its necessity: illegal immigration, shoplifting, terrorism, anti-social behaviour and, of course, Safety.
The police, having begun using facial recognition at large public events, now use it routinely in towns and cities and the Government has announced it will be rolled out nationally. A growing number of shops has cameras screening customers’ faces for matches to a list of undesirables held on a database. Facial recognition is being trialled at train stations. AI cameras are surveilling the behaviour of drivers in Devon and Cornwall inside their cars. Cameras and AI-driven monitoring systems are being installed in cars to track drivers’ head and eye movements to monitor whether they’re fit to drive.
A key question arises: given that the collection of biometric data requires the explicit consent of the person concerned, how come it’s being widely taken, in the street, in shops and at airports?
The answer goes something like: authorities and organisations are overturning the core principle of data ownership by means of a set of quasi-legal justifications such as “necessity” and “public interest”. In the UK, this boils down to getting the kind of “all right, as long as you’re careful” permission given by a parent – see the UK’s data guardian the Information Commissioner’s Office, under pressure from the Home Office, deciding there was a “legitimate purpose” for facial recognition in supermarkets subject to safeguards. The EU’s new EES system does require the traveller to press a button indicating consent, but since refusal means being turned away at the border, it hardly qualifies as full and free consent.
These developments illustrate the growing desire of the authorities to increase their power over the people. In a bizarre yet telling comment, the Home Secretary recently told the media of her aspiration to create a panopticon system of state surveillance “where the eyes of the state can be on you at all times”. The Benthamite model of the panopticon has long been recognised as a symbol of modern state oppression, with French philosopher Michel Foucault identifying it as a quintessentially modern form of surveillance. Bureaucratic and efficient, the watcher doesn’t even have to be present and over time the watched internalise the expected behaviours to the point where they lose the capacity for agency. The panopticon embodies everything a civilised, politically advanced country, equipped with the lessons of recent history, should avoid.
Does Shabana Mahmood not know this? Or is the simple truth that the political class has become shameless in its will-to-dominate?
The delight on the face of Mark Rowley – the Met Police Commissioner who effectively assaulted a journalist – after winning a High Court challenge on facial recognition is emblematic. Until now, British policing has been based on the equalitarian principle that “the police are the public and the public are the police”, with officers working as “citizens in uniform” in the shared project of maintaining law and order. Cooperation and consent are integral to the model, but the introduction of mass surveillance changes the balance of power. It transforms me from a free citizen in a democratic society, innocent until proven guilty and anonymous in public space, into a member of a population under police surveillance.
This signifies more than the absence of consent. Like the many Britons who expressed concern about the use of facial recognition by the police in a recent survey, I am actively opposed to it. The introduction of mass surveillance turns policing by consent into policing against the will of the people.
State surveillance won’t stop there because power always wants more. The Government consultation on facial recognition revealed the likely trajectory if surveillance policing continues unchecked. It included questions asking whether a legal framework should give the police the right to use “inferential technology” to make judgements about our emotions and likely actions and whether the new law should be “flexible” enough to provide a legal basis for the police to use technologies that have yet to be invented. This would tie in with plans already well underway to introduce a system of AI-driven “predictive policing” to identify crimes before they happen. They mark the beginning of an experiment in which the authorities use new and emerging technologies to see what kind of behavioural change they can introduce to an entire population.
Meanwhile, in that influential space between government and the public, sections of the media are cheering on the end of privacy, repeating the anti-privacy snake’s line that surveillance cuts crime. See the writer Celia Walden falling for it hook, line and sinker in the Telegraph.
Earlier this year, I went to a local Sainsbury’s to research a piece for the Spectator about the supermarket’s use of facial recognition. Almost none of the customers I spoke to were aware they were under surveillance and most instinctively recoiled at the news. One woman was visibly shocked, saying it made her feel “strange”. Then, overriding her natural response, she succumbed to the prevailing orthodoxy and, with an “Oh well, if you’ve nothing to hide”, pushed her trolley into the store.
You’d think that truthers would do better. Recently I bumped into Monica, an acquaintance with hardcore truther credentials, much better than mine. She’d recently been to Spain where the EU’s Electronic Entry System is being rolled out. The new border controls require citizens from non-EU countries to give fingerprints and a face scan, a system that would tie in nicely with the digital health certificate (aka vaccine passport) the EU is developing with the WHO ahead of “the next pandemic”. With the mainstream media focusing on delays at the borders and anecdotal tales of successful workarounds on social media, I was curious about her experience.
Monica looked vague. Oh yes, she said, she’d given the border officials her fingerprints. But she’d probably done that already, elsewhere. Wasn’t it the same in Britain? Anyway, she concluded, we have no privacy any more.
This is so far down the throat of the anti-privacy snake that the victim is practically bathing in the digestive juices of the stomach. A variation on this response is surprisingly common among digital dissenters. Some go straight from outrage to concluding they have ‘no choice’ but to comply. Others seem to revel in the thought of the digital prison that will result if most of us do comply, evoking that possibility with the delicious frisson of someone enjoying a horror movie. They have fallen victim to the compliance fallacy, the mistaken belief that giving up this right or that freedom makes no difference because life will go on more or less as before. The dystopian future they profess to fear is not real to them.
All this brings into relief an important aspect of the digital dilemma I outlined in Part I of this series. It is not enough to know. It is not enough to complain. In order to make a conscious decision about which fork in the road to take, a clear stance is required. And for a society to stay free, it’s not even enough to say No: we need to develop a positive vision of what we want, one that builds in rights associated with digital technology. As Veliz points out, most of the digital tools we use are built to surveil, but it doesn’t have to be like that: technology is the result of human choice.
But I’m getting ahead of myself and straying into the territory of Part III.
A person could be forgiven for thinking the general public is being deliberately rushed into giving up privacy before we’ve had a chance to consider the implications. A couple of issues highlight just how little we understand what we’re doing.
Data breaches. You’ll get my point if I list a few major ones:
- UK Biobank. In April 2026, the health records of half a million British citizens who had volunteered as research subjects for UK Biobank appeared for sale on a Chinese consumer website. The leaked data include diagnostic records, brain scans, blood samples and genome sequences. While the records were de-identified, it is already clear that relinking the data back to the person is possible. This is the 198th time UK Biobank data has been breached in less than a year.
- Aadhaar. In 2018, the personal details of over 1.1 billion Indian citizens, including biometric data, were exposed as access to the state digital identity database was made available for sale. Those responsible didn’t hack the system but accessed users’ log-in credentials through security flaws. It is one of the largest data breaches in history (so far).
- One Login. This hasn’t actually happened yet, but if you’re in Britain this is the data breach waiting to happen. The Government’s identity verification system lacks basic security features – a fact that’s been revealed in a variety of ways, from a civil service whistleblower to official internal audits and tests – see here and here. Since One Login is becoming the main access point for Government services and is envisaged to become the basis for the controversial new system of digital ID, the sensitive data of more and more people will be exposed.
What are the likely consequences of this trajectory? We don’t really know. The newness of digital life rules out any certainty about how things might play out. One thing is clear: consent, the central principle of privacy, is already being breached by institutions that are supposed to protect us. One Login is compulsory for company directors and it’s likely the Government will attempt to extend mandatory sign-up to other sections of the population. It requires biometrics, so the sensitive data of millions is being put at risk without any consent being given.
Who has liability for data breaches? Under UK law, data controllers, which include Government departments, councils and contractors as well as individuals and companies, are technically liable. But for compensation to be awarded, it must be proven that the data controller failed to abide by data protection law and the victim must have suffered material harm as a result of the data breach.
But if you take a look at the terms and conditions for One Login, you’ll find a raft of exclusions and exemptions so comprehensive that Government Digital Services effectively has a free pass for anything that might happen. It does not even guarantee that the point of access to many essential services will continue to exist: “We may suspend, stop, remove, update, change or GOV.UK One Login without notice at any time.” The terms and conditions state that GDS “will not be liable for any damage caused by a virus, denial of service attack or any other harmful material that may infect your device, equipment, programs, data or other proprietary material due to your use of GOV.UK One Login”. GDS is not even liable for failing to comply with its own terms and conditions if the circumstances are deemed “beyond its control”.
Citizens of Britain, if you think handing over data to an outfit which explicitly puts you at risk while absolving itself of any responsibility is a good idea, I don’t know what to say to you.
The statement from UK Biobank about the recent leak of the data of its 500,000 volunteers is a foretaste of what we can expect: an assurance that “your personal information is safe” with a vague promise that “additional security measures” will be put in place in future.
Biometric data leaks are permanent in the sense that you can’t just change your password or get a new credit card and start again. Whoever has data linked to your face and fingerprints possesses information that identifies you for as long as you live. Potentially, such information can be put to a variety of uses, from financially-motivated identity theft to creating deep fakes that take us into the realm of science fiction. One obvious use would be to forge credentials for illegal immigrants – ironically the latest justification for a mandatory, centralised digital ID system.
This joke by Protonmail makes the point about how this could end up perfectly. The rapid digitalisation of all aspects of human life makes it inevitable that data breaches will increase in number, size and gravity. In time, with so much data floating around the world and so little certainty about its veracity, the verification system under construction could lose all credibility. Then what?
Meanwhile, the legitimate collection of medical information for health research raises questions that are as vital as they are under-considered.
The data provided by British volunteers to UK Biobank – a name which literally means “an institution designed to keep money from life” – and Our Future Health, a project which began recruiting its five million research subjects in 2022, is made available to organisations around the world. UK Biobank says researchers can come from academic, charity, government and commercial organisations and must be “eligible”. Our Future Health says they must be “approved” and come from “trusted research environments”. Yet the information donors are given about the use to which their health records will be put is explained in the vaguest of terms, with promises that it will help progress in “health” and “science”.
The list of Our Future Health’s partners provides a clue as to some of the possible uses. They include Regeneron Genetics Center, a subsidiary of a pharmaceutical company conducting population-wide research in genetics. A while ago I had a series of conversations with a biotech insider who has left the industry for reasons of conscience. The things he said – only some of which I can publish here – made my blood run cold. He talked of genetic profiling and genetic manipulation on a population-wide scale (emphasis intended). The long-term storage of genetic material, he said, was key to research that might be conducted well into the future.
My source had enough to horrify me without mentioning research in synthetic biology. This, the World Economic Forum explains, involves “redesigning biological systems that don’t already exist in nature” but are already being used in “plant-based burgers” and “healthcare developments including the mRNA vaccination used to combat the COVID-19 virus”. According to futurologist Amy Webb, “social biology has the potential to create cells that take instructions and can edit the human body, which could change life as we know it. Importantly, she is referring to the near future rather than a distant maybe”.
Now that’s what I call transhumanism.
There is a way out of all this. Like the best solutions, it’s beautifully simple and can be summarised thus: humans decide to do something different.
This is the second in a three-part series looking at Digital Dystopia vs Digital Rights and was first published on Alex Klaushofer’s Substack Ways of Seeing.
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