Have we thought about privacy all wrong?

I recently returned from my first visit to China. I was there for about two weeks in part as an effort to make real a place I have been learning and reading about for years. It was fascinating and pushed me to ask a lot of interesting questions that gave further nuance to some beliefs I previously held.

I knew a fair bit about the security state before going, but it was another thing entirely to feel it, to see the cameras, visibly in every nook and cranny, obviously watching everyone's move, in historical sites, as well as street corners. It was off-putting to have my face scanned for every ticketed thing I did. I mean, I'm somewhat acculturated like most Americans now to this behavior from US flight security, and so it made sense for planes. But not only was my face scanned, my bags were x-rayed, my passport scanned for trains, for the metro, for the theater! In many of these situations there was even a worker doing body searches with a metal detecting wand.

At first it was eerie, but after a while it seemed a bit...quotidian? What started the shift was a realization that a large fraction of these moments were clearly security theater, the worker not acknowledging the beeping as I walked through the scanner, the metal detecting wand barely coming up to my torso, the worker clearly unwilling to put in the effort to raise it above their waist. And so I started to wonder why was I feeling the ick of privacy invasion. Was it all just in my head?

In the book The Known Citizen, Sarah Igo makes the argument that privacy is a social convention that is only made possible by technology. In other words, privacy is a value judgement, a construct living only in the minds of the people that believe in it, and not by definition an unalloyed good.

The first technology Igo references is the portable Kodak camera. Before then, if one wanted a portrait, they'd need to explicitly hire someone and pose in a studio. Now, suddenly anyone could take your picture, without permission, anywhere in public! In 1890 in response, Louis Brandeis, who later became a supreme court justice, and Samuel Warren were furious about the privacy invasion (with its relationship to gossip journalism) and felt that existing law wasn't enough to handle the problem. Together they published in the Harvard law review a piece establishing the concept of the "right to be left alone", laying the foundation for the individualized privacy that we still live with today.

Igo goes on in her book to explain how, as the US encountered a number of technologies, the portable camera, the telephone and wiretapping, the social security number, society made a series of values-based choices centered around the individual, that they should have a right to be left alone.

This was the intellectual foundation of privacy in the US, and, I'd argue, for the west in general — at least when it comes to the internet. If China is viewed through this lens, that when society encounters a new technology it must make a choice of how citizens should be known, then it becomes clear to me that they just made a different choice than the west. And instead of demonizing their system, calling it Big Brother and using its social credit system as television fodder, I should try to understand it from their principled viewpoint.

I'm not an apologist or naive to the costs, but exploring their system honestly is the only way to explore our own assumptions.

So, this is my attempt at that. I intend to steelman the argument that China made a different values-based choice and it isn't wrong. It is only different.

China has had massive economic growth over the last several decades without necessarily having the same rate of maturation in its institutions. This has meant that they've needed to make hard trade-offs that the US didn't necessarily need to. What do I mean by this? China has historically had a very low trust environment. A citizen couldn't trust that goods would be delivered when ordered, that services would be rendered, that houses would be built when paid for.

Two concrete examples.

In 2008, in the run up to the Beijing Olympics, it was discovered that a massive amount of baby formula was adulterated with the chemical melamine, leading to the hospitalization of tens of thousands of infants and even the death of a few. It was an attempt by middle men to water down the product while making it appear like the formula still had the same protein content. The worst part was that it was covered up, only coming to light because a New Zealand company, in a joint venture with a Chinese counterpart, went to the New Zealand government who eventually pushed Beijing to go public.

Another example. In 2012, an academic paper was published claiming that from 2008-2011 the Chinese consumer-to-consumer shopping site Taobao, basically Chinese eBay without competition, had 80% of sellers committing some form of trust fraud. Trust scores are ratings that consumers give to sellers for their quality after making a purchase, like an Amazon review with a number of stars and a comment. A gray industry popped up to exploit the system, with sellers trading positive feedback ratings, leading to a death spiral of trust. By the company's own research of seven months in the late 2010s, between 9% and 47% of all rated transactions were fraudulent.

These two examples illustrate the crisis China found itself in. It needed some way to start addressing its crisis of trust that wouldn't take generations to build. One remedy they devised in reaction to this environment that would pay dividends quickly was instituting a Foucauldian panopticon. The idea being that if everyone has the tacit knowledge that they are always being watched, they are less likely to commit anti-social behavior. This has led to supposedly very low crime rates in cities.

This goes beyond cameras though. As I described of my own experience, everywhere I went my ID was scanned. This means that if the state finds out that someone commits a crime, for example fraud or another white collar crime, they will have a hell of a time trying to travel. All transportation, save for cars, requires scanning of your ID by machines or authorities. This again further de-incentivizes crime and anti-social behavior.

The combination of ubiquitous video cameras and the tacit knowledge that individuals who have committed anti-social behavior cannot travel means that it will feel safe walking home in the city at night in the dark and that one can trust that they will mostly not be scammed or pick-pocketed.

So far I've shown that China's creation of a digital panopticon is an admirable attempt to quickly address a huge domestic concern of low trust. But why wasn't there pushback by the populace? What is their version of the "right to be left alone?"

In Confucian values, the unit of society isn't the individual, it's the relationship. To live a good life requires being known by the community because virtue that is invisible isn't doing its social work. Wearing this lens colors in for me a Chinese worldview that has the legibility of the individual as the center of its ethic. And to have legibility central, it is not possible to expect to be "left alone." This goes part of the way for me to explain why the Chinese don't see the lack of privacy and state control as inherently oppressive in the same way I do. It's also made me reconsider the images that are brought up when I think about the surveillance state. There are two, Big Brother and Meow Meow Beans. Let's take them each in turn.

It is hard as a westerner to imagine a surveillance state as anything other than "Big Brother is watching". But what if it isn't "big" brother, but "older" brother, where older brother is, sure, taking away some of your freedoms, but doing it so that he can look after you and make sure you are safe. Modern Americans have a terrible mistrust of our government, and for good reason (hello many news stories of the US govt lying to the citizenry, e.g. Snowden, Watergate, Iran-Contra). So what if that is the extraordinary bit and China is the more ordinary one? What if in China the citizens don't assume that their government, which to me is so obviously oppressive, is in fact looking out for their best interest?

Allow me to take a quick tangent to demonstrate this point. Over the last ten years, as Xi Jinping has been amassing power, he has simultaneously invested in improving urban life for millions of Chinese. I recall when I was younger that there used to be lots of news stories about how horrific the smog was over Chinese cities. Yet today air quality has improved tremendously with emissions standards now defined that are stricter than either the US or the EU. Air quality has improved so much that when I was in China, my friend checked the AQI and expressed that it was even better than NYC! Related to air quality, the Chinese have also invested tremendously in improvements to their power infrastructure, green energy (Adam Tooze has a forthcoming book on the topic that I think will fill out the whole story), and pushed to convert the majority of its domestic car fleet to be electric, which obviously run a lot cleaner and quieter (we got to ride in so many cool, futuristic, electric cars from many companies I'd never heard of).

So this begs the question: privacy from whom? In China, it is the government, which "in theory" is accountable to the people that does the watching. But in the US, it is more opaque, private institutions, Google, Meta, which make choices without any pretense that they are doing what the citizens want and there's no recourse if they make a decision I don't prefer.

When people hear about China's social credit system they normally think of the Black Mirror episode, which was surely an inspiration. However, I think of the episode of the sitcom Community where all students at the community college install an app called Meow Meow Beans. The way the fictitious system works is everyone can rate anyone else in some P2P market-based social-Darwinism mud bath. It is hilarious as all of Community is, but is not at all indicative of its inspiration. China did indeed pilot scores at one point, but promptly abandoned the idea. The system would actually be far better compared to a complex, patchwork of bureaucracies that link interconnecting blacklists based on "Public Credit Information" which has the effect of stopping some people from traveling or purchasing luxury goods, not essentials.

Similar to the panopticon as an attempt to build trust amongst society, the origin of the social credit system was as an answer to the US's FICO scores and Better Business Bureau infrastructure. In the early 90s, China had very little financial record keeping and wanted to regulate businesses in areas like food safety, financial fraud, and intellectual property. The system today is aimed mostly at contract enforcement and commercial fraud, not forcing individuals to judge and rate their peers.

In the US, if a contractor scams you, you can take them to court, leave a review, or report them to the government. These are institutions designed to cultivate trust that have been built over a long period of time. China, due to its incredible pace of growth, hasn't had that luxury. Like so much of its other projects, China built huge systems, overbuilt perhaps, that would work quickly to address those deficiencies.

In my telling, we've seen China build its surveillance panopticon and its social credit system to build trust. China doesn't center the individual's right to be left alone, instead pursuing a value of legibility. This has been specific to China, using it as a tool to talk about their views on privacy. But now I want to look at privacy directly and ask some more direct questions.

So, by instituting privacy in the west, what do we lose? Concretely, if I decided to leave on my GPS all day, and the government knew everywhere I went, and everything I bought, and who I interacted with, what would be the harm? Obviously it's icky and makes me uncomfortable to consider, but the harms on any given day are none. I'm afraid of possible abuse in the future by some potential bad government actors. Not actual abuse. And let me state it clearly, I'm sympathetic to this argument! I probably still believe it. But that belief has a cost. And we therefore have to ask what do we give up by instituting privacy.

Let's start with me. What do I give up? Well, I have a very slow email client and calendar app with fewer features, bad integrations with other software, and a general air of inconvenience, all so I don't give all of my information to Google (I already give all my map/location data).

I give up some trust and lots of convenience. In China, at first I thought it was weird that officials scanned my passport at the opera in Chengdu or at Tiger Hill in Suzhou, but in actuality it was incredibly convenient to not once search for a ticket, for anything. For many people, to get onto the metro they don't need to pull anything out of their pockets. They just have their face scanned.

Historically, there has always been lots of data publicly available about individuals. However, it was hard to access and hard to compare with anything else. This was privacy through obscurity and it was reasonably expected. The elephant in the room now that we have to reckon with is the increasing interpretability of this information because computer systems allow data to be aggregated by person far easier and AI makes aggregated qualitative data legible at incredibly reasonable cost.

The argument I'm pushing at here is that there is tons of surveillance on you in the west and it's becoming more and more interpretable as software monopolizes and AI makes it interpretable. China is at least honest about it. They don't pretend that you have your freedoms while simultaneously tracking your technology usage to the millisecond in order to sell ads.

China has by no means eschewed its power of surveillance when the CCP thought it was necessary. In the summer of 1997, the British handed over Hong Kong to the Chinese, who promised a system of "one country, two systems" lasting 50 years. However, in 2019, an extradition bill, which was widely viewed as being written by the CCP, was brought to the floor of the Hong Kong government, leading to the largest protest demonstrations in the history of the country. In response, the state used facial recognition with CCTV and "smart lampposts" to identify suspects in the crowds and prosecute them. Not only that, in 2020 a law was passed that allowed for retroactive prosecution, meaning data previously collected during protests became actionable after the fact and was used against many protesters. In addition, police used cell phone tracking, transport records, social media monitoring, and would even force protestors' faces towards their phones in order to unlock them.

As disturbing as the treatment of the Hong Kong protesters was, it's difficult to compare to the quiet assault on the Uyghur population. From 2016 through 2017, in order to build a comprehensive database of its population, the Xinjiang province began a massive project of gathering biometric data from all residents from 12 to 65, where they collected DNA samples, iris scans, fingerprints, and blood types, often under the guise of free physical exams. This system was often paired with what is referred to as the IJOP, the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, which would aggregate CCTV data, checkpoints, phone apps, and financial records, flagging Uyghurs for detention in "re-education camps." According to a 2019 Human Rights Watch report, some of the behavior that was flagged as "suspicious" was as innocuous as using the back door instead of the front door, not socializing with neighbors, buying more gas than usual, or using WhatsApp.

China had designed a general-purpose, mass surveillance system, but deployed it specifically in Xinjiang, which is home to the largest Uyghur population in the world, as part of its "Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism." They scanned faces, read IDs, collected data from electronic devices, and even forced Uyghurs to install surveillance apps on their phones. The system I've spent this essay considering, of weighing its costs and benefits, is the same system that enabled this treatment.

Upon returning from China, I found myself still believing in strong encryption. I'm still itchy when I've forgotten to turn off my GPS. But in general I'm less certain that privacy is an unalloyed good.

When we find ourselves with a benevolent government in power, society can be pretty confident that they will respect the privacy of its people. In the meantime, society bears whatever costs privacy incurs. However, if a tyrannical government comes into power, do we expect they will respect norms around privacy? Privacy laws are useless precisely when we need them most. So should we always pay the cost?

The whole time in China it felt surreal to see all of the cameras and to have my face scanned constantly. It felt icky and that feeling never went away. But even so, I never felt uncomfortable or unsafe anywhere. I understood the cause and effect of what metabolizing that ick was buying me.

While in Chongqing, a solo female traveler joined me and my friend as we explored the city. She had been in China for around a month at this point and was planning on seeing a handful more cities after we left. I was impressed to see her venturing out on her own, unburdened and confident. Yes, of course she was brave, but I also saw that China made it safe for her, relatively speaking, everywhere, all the time. They paid for that psychological safety for her, that physical safety with the same tools that caused me psychological discomfort for feeling watched. Safety and discomfort, in this instance, are two sides of the same coin.

It's easy to see the CCP as having enormous power over its citizenry and using it to access complete control of them. But the west doesn't have clean hands here. The American company, Thermo Fisher, provided equipment and helped Chinese authorities develop tools to identify Uyghur ethnicity from genetic samples.

So I come away with believing privacy isn't a terminal value, just an instrumental one. And if that's true, the question isn't how much privacy is the right amount but privacy from whom, and at what cost?