NYT: One of the Last Bastions of Digital Privacy Is Under Threat

NYT: One of the Last Bastions of Digital Privacy Is Under Threat by Julia Angwin:

We might think of most of our day-to-day activities as private. Rarely is anyone deliberately eavesdropping on our conversations, spying on where we shop or following us on our commute. The government needs a search warrant or other court order to listen to our phone calls, to discover what books we checked out from the library or to read our mail.

But a tsunami of digital tracking technology has made a large portion of our lives public by default. Nearly everything we do online and on our phones — our movements, our conversations, our reading, watching and shopping habits — is being watched by commercial entities whose data can often be used by governments.

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The campaign to institute mass suspicionless searches is global. In Britain, the Online Safety Bill, which is making its way through Parliament, demands that messaging services identify and remove child exploitation images, “whether communicated publicly or privately by means of the service.” In the United States, bills introduced in Congress require online services to identify and remove such images. And in the European Union, a leaked memo has revealed that many member countries support weakening encryption as part of the fight against child exploitation.