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"  Let&amp;#039;s start with one thing you hear over and over again when interviewing people about privacy: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve got nothing to hide.&amp;quot; Yeah, I hear that a lot, too, right? My feeling about that is, I also have nothing to hide, really. That&amp;#039;s why I think the checking is unfair. I&amp;#039;m not a suspect. I never would&amp;#039;ve had a file in the government, anywhere, because there&amp;#039;s no reason . . . except for maybe my tax returns. Certainly not in any of the intelligence agencies or my local policeeven 10 years ago, right? Now I definitely do. That&amp;#039;s not because anything has changed about me. It&amp;#039;s because [it&amp;#039;s become so easy] for them to surveil everyone.   The question I ask is, what are they gonna do with that information? If it&amp;#039;s totally benign, that&amp;#039;s one thing, but I&amp;#039;m not sure we can guarantee that for all time to come. Just think about our changing social norms about drug use, right? Our social norms change over time. We&amp;#039;re willing to accept a certain amount of drug use, but maybe not so much. You don&amp;#039;t really know when you&amp;#039;re gonna get into trouble. Are you willing to trust that everything you do right now is not ever gonna be considered wrong? When you assume you have nothing to hide, you concede way too much information at the outsetwhen it&amp;#039;s actually your right not to have that trove of information on you exist in the first place. Right. I think that&amp;#039;s one thing that&amp;#039;s interesting about our country versus others. Basically, in Europe, privacy is considered a human right. They don&amp;#039;t ask whether or not you have anything to hide because they have this very different approach, which is you should have it as a guaranteed right. We don&amp;#039;t have that approach here, so we have to defend it and argue about it. How do you find a balance between alerting people to all this digital spying without making them worry more than necessary? That&amp;#039;s exactly why I wrote the book. For three years I had been covering privacy issues for The Wall Street Journal and leading an investigative team. We&amp;#039;d done stories that they&amp;#039;re tracking you here and they&amp;#039;re tracking you there. These were all revelations that people were shocked to find out. I did start to feel like I was contributing to the problem of fearmongering. I do think there are serious consequences to this tracking . . . but I was worried I was contributing to the feeling of helplessness, where people felt like, &amp;quot;Well, they know everything. The cat&amp;#039;s out of the bag, so there&amp;#039;s nothing I can do about it.&amp;quot;  My book was an attempt to investigate whether we can do anything about it. What I hope is that . . . everyone will take a little something away from it and realize, you know what? I could do that. I could get better passwords, or I could block ad tracking. Or they might choose to do the really hard things. I wanted people to realize they do have some options.   I consider those options to be a little bit like voting. If you care about privacy and you do something about it, then there&amp;#039;s some metrics that people care. Right now, there&amp;#039;s no metrics that show that anyone really cares.  Would you say that technology has opened the door to more possibilities for intrusion, but on the flip side, also gives us tools to fight back and reclaim our privacy? Yes, and I agree that technology can be part of the solution. I think it might be hard for it to be the whole solution. If you think of it as an arms race between us, the citizens, and the people who are surveilling us, which is companies and the government, we&amp;#039;re gonna be underfunded in that race. [But if] we all just started encrypting our email, and we all started blocking unwanted tracking, and we all decided that we were not going to . . . agree to participate in companies that just say they&amp;#039;re gonna sell your data, we could make some decisions. What were some of the problems you ran into when you tried to get off the grid? It was hard for me to give up my smartphone and do a burner phone or a flip phone. And I was pretty alone in a lot of the social networks and the tools that I used. That&amp;#039;s why the section I have on encryption is called &amp;quot;Lonely Codes.&amp;quot; Because it was an entirely lonely existence. I could get myself all encrypted, but then convincing anyone I communicated with to do it was such a high bar. Silent Circle is one of the easier ones. Even that I had a hard time getting people to usein part because it&amp;#039;s very expensive.   The burner phone was kind of a nightmare, because you think you have a phone with you, but you really can&amp;#039;t use it to call your regular contacts, or else you just basically might as well have your regular phone with you. And then you start giving out that number. Then it becomes your number, right? It was kind of a disaster. I ended up signing up for this service that gave me the equivalent of a Google Voice number, but I didn&amp;#039;t wanna use Google. I got this other number, and then it would forward to the burner phone. That was sort of a okay solution. The thing is, that company then has everything. Nothing really is an answer on the phone. How much did you try to convince people to join you? My husband refuses to do any of this. He&amp;#039;s like, &amp;quot;Are you kidding me? This is too much work.&amp;quot; My kids actually love it, though. They do Silent text and Silent calls with me. They love that it&amp;#039;s secret. Kids love secrets, right? Having the secret is more fun.   The hardest part was my sources. I didn&amp;#039;t want them to think that talking to me is going to end up in trouble. Obviously, these days it&amp;#039;s getting more dangerous to talk to journalists, particularly about these kinds of topics. None of themliterally none of themwanted to do it because it was too much work. It&amp;#039;s all this software. That was disappointing but actually understandable.  A lot of these privacy issues involve information that you volunteer. Is this battle founded on this idea of convenience and sharing versus security now?  I still think that what you share explicitly on a social network is really a small part of what is being collected about you. What&amp;#039;s probably less obvious to people is that so much of what you do online, just what websites you visit and what searches you do, can be much more revealing about you than what you post. Because we post the sanitized, super-clean version. It&amp;#039;s all curated . . . Everybody&amp;#039;s posts are, like, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m so awesome.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;m sure that that is of value to the people who do surveillance, but it seems as though they get much more information about us from watching our behavior. Where do we go? What do we do? What do we buy? Who are we talking to?   It&amp;#039;s the who are we talking to that really bothers me about social networks. The fact that your friends list is exposed, I think, is too revealing. That&amp;#039;s why I quit LinkedIn and I unfriended everyone on Facebook. I didn&amp;#039;t quit Facebook because I wanted to be able to see into Facebook, so I just kept a profile that basically says, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not here. I&amp;#039;m on Twitter.&amp;quot;  A lot of these services you mentioned, especially the most popular ones, are free. But they take our information and offer it to advertisers, which gives them value and makes them profitable. Should we have a choice in the matter? We have to decide whether we&amp;#039;re willing to pay for stuff. I&amp;#039;m willing to pay. I might not be a big enough market, but I do find it surprising that there aren&amp;#039;t people offering me more services. I can&amp;#039;t find an email service that I can pay for that doesn&amp;#039;t track me. I think that that is an indication to how far we&amp;#039;ve gone down the free road.   You&amp;#039;re exchanging your data and getting a free service. The problem is, you don&amp;#039;t know how much your data is worth. Right now, it&amp;#039;s not worth very much, actually. The Financial Times did an analysis, and my data was worth 28 cents. But what you don&amp;#039;t know is how much it&amp;#039;s worth over time, and when you aggregate it and add other data to it. f it&amp;#039;s being used just for marketing ads, maybe you&amp;#039;re willing to trade it. If it&amp;#039;s gonna be used against you by the government to put you in jail, it&amp;#039;s worth a lot. How do we get more choices about our privacy? I&amp;#039;m hopeful that, post-Snowden, that&amp;#039;s changing. There are a little bit more companies offering privacy-protecting services. I do think a market is starting to emerge. However, it&amp;#039;s not gonna be cheap. I pay a lot of money for that Silent Circle thing. I think it&amp;#039;s like $120 a year. added up everything that I spent on privacy last year, and it was $2200.  Oh, wow.  Yeah, that&amp;#039;s a lot of money, and it doesn&amp;#039;t count my time.  What about regulation? How does the law need to change? The laws that we operate under right now really envision an outdated mode of privacy, starting with the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment protects the walls of your home. They can&amp;#039;t come in and get your papers from your home without a search warrant. That is still true, but the thing is, now we don&amp;#039;t store our &amp;quot;papers&amp;quot; in our home. We store them in Google Docs.   Last year there was a Supreme Court decision, U.S. v. Jones, where Justice Sotomayor wrote in her concurrence that we may need to rethink the entire concept of the way the Fourth Amendment works in this world, where we store all of our documents outside of the home. That has not yet been adopted by the Supreme Court, but it was the first time that we&amp;#039;d seen the court acknowledge that there might need to be a rethinking.   The problem is, with the court it&amp;#039;ll take 10 years.  How hard is it to sustain a private life in the long term? Do you still actively use all the tools that you researched for your book? I really do use them all. The thing that I haven&amp;#039;t solved is the phone. Other than limiting the apps on it and using encryption on the phone, I still haven&amp;#039;t really gotten to the point where I feel comfortable just leaving the house without my phone. I have kids, and I want them to reach me. I still am surprisingly committed to it. I think what happens is, the more you realize how much you&amp;#039;re being monitored, the more worried you get about it. I&amp;#039;m strangely more worried about it.  I haven&amp;#039;t been able to deal with the data brokers. It&amp;#039;s just not workable to never give your name out when you make purchases. Those kind of things are really hard.  Is it beneficial for people to at least get to that level, where maybe they can&amp;#039;t solve problems like the phone and the data brokers, but at least they&amp;#039;re aware? I think so. Even if you don&amp;#039;t think you care about privacy, you do probably care about being tracked, and about criminals. They all use the same techniques. As a society, we&amp;#039;re all gonna just need to get more tech-literate, whether we want to or not. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/how-to/a10154/are-you-too-paranoid-about-digital-privacy-or-not-paranoid-enough-16563551/>