Many people in the united states seem to have the opinion, that the “public is willing to give up most of their privacy” in particular when dealing with online services such as Facebook. I believe in his keynote at ECML-PKDD, Albert-László Barabási of Harvard University expessed such a view, that this data will just become more and more available. I’m not sure if it was him or someone else (I believe it was someone else) that essentially claimed “privacy is irrelevant”. Another popular opinion is that “it’s only old people caring for privacy”.

However, just like politics, these things tend to oscillate from one extreme to another. For example, the recent years in Europe, conservative parties were winning one election after another. Now in France, the socialist parties have just won the senate, the conservative parties in Germany are losing in one state after the other and so on. And this will change back again, too. Democracy also lives from changing roles in government, as this drives both progress and fights corruption.

We might be seeing the one extreme in the united states right now, where people are readily giving away their location and interests for free access to a web site. This can swing back any time.

In Germany, one of the government parties - the liberal democrats, FDP - just dropped out of the Berlin city government, down to 1.8% of voters. Yes, this is the party the German foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle is from. The pirate party [en.wikipedia.org] - much of their program is about privacy, civil rights, copyright reforms and the internet - which didn’t even participate in the previous elections since they were was founded just 5 years ago jumped to 8.9%, scoring higher than the liberal democrats did in the previous elections. In 2009 they scored a surprising high 2% in the federal elections - current polls see them anywhere from 4% to 7% at the federal level, so they will probably get seats in parliament in 2013. (There are also other reasons why the liberal democrats have been losing voters so badly, though! Their current numbers indicate they might drop out of parliament in 2013.)

The Greens in Germany, which are also very much oriented towards privacy and civil rights, are also on the rise, and in march just became the second strongest party and senior partner in the governing coalition of Baden-Württemberg, which historically was a heartland of the conservatives.

So don’t assume that privacy is irrelevant nowadays. The public opinion can swing quickly. In particular in democratic systems that have room for more than two parties - so probably not in the united states - such topics can actually influence elections a lot. Within 30 years, the Greens now frequently reach values of 20% in federal polls and up to 30% in some states. It doesn’t look as if they are going to go away soon.

Also don’t assume that it’s just old people caring about privacy

  • in Germany, in particular the pirate party and the Greens are very much favored by the young people. The typical voter for the pirates is less than 30 years old, male, has a higher education and works in the media or internet business.

In Germany, much of the protest for more privacy - and against the too readily data collection by companies such as Facebook and Google - is driven by the young internet-users and -workers. I believe this will be similar in other parts of Europe - there are other pirate parties all over Europe. And this can happen to the united states any time, too.

Electronic freedom - e.g. pushed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but also the open source movement - does have quite a history in the united states. But in particular open source has made such a huge progress the last decade, these movements in the US could just be a bit out of breath right now. I’m sure they will come back with a strong push against the privacy invasions we’re seeing right now. And that can likely take down a giant like Facebook, too. So don’t bet on people continuing to give up their privacy!