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There is an entire genre of YouTube videos
devoted to an experience which
I am certain that everyone in this room has had.
It entails an individual who,
thinking they're alone,
engages in some expressive behavior —
wild singing, gyrating dancing,
some mild sexual activity —
only to discover that, in fact, they are not alone,
that there is a person watching and lurking,
the discovery of which causes them
to immediately cease what they were doing
in horror.
The sense of shame and humiliation
in their face is palpable.
It's the sense of,
"This is something I'm willing to do
only if no one else is watching."
This is the crux of the work
on which I have been singularly focused
for the last 16 months,
the question of why privacy matters,
a question that has arisen
in the context of a global debate,
enabled by the revelations of Edward Snowden
that the United States and its partners,
unbeknownst to the entire world,
has converted the Internet,
once heralded as an unprecedented tool
of liberation and democratization,
into an unprecedented zone
of mass, indiscriminate surveillance.
There is a very common sentiment
that arises in this debate,
even among people who are uncomfortable
with mass surveillance, which says
that there is no real harm
that comes from this large-scale invasion
because only people who are engaged in bad acts
have a reason to want to hide
and to care about their privacy.
This worldview is implicitly grounded
in the proposition that there are two kinds of people in the world,
good people and bad people.
Bad people are those who plot terrorist attacks
or who engage in violent criminality
and therefore have reasons to want to hide what they're doing,
have reasons to care about their privacy.
But by contrast, good people
are people who go to work,
come home, raise their children, watch television.
They use the Internet not to plot bombing attacks
but to read the news or exchange recipes
or to plan their kids' Little League games,
and those people are doing nothing wrong
and therefore have nothing to hide
and no reason to fear
the government monitoring them.
The people who are actually saying that
are engaged in a very extreme act
of self-deprecation.
What they're really saying is,
"I have agreed to make myself
such a harmless and unthreatening
and uninteresting person that I actually don't fear
having the government know what it is that I'm doing."
This mindset has found what I think
is its purest expression
in a 2009 interview with
the longtime CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, who,
when asked about all the different ways his company
is causing invasions of privacy
for hundreds of millions of people around the world,
said this: He said,
"If you're doing something that you don't want
other people to know,
maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Now, there's all kinds of things to say about
that mentality,
the first of which is that the people who say that,
who say that privacy isn't really important,
they don't actually believe it,
and the way you know that they don't actually believe it
is that while they say with their words that privacy doesn't matter,
with their actions, they take all kinds of steps
to safeguard their privacy.
They put passwords on their email
and their social media accounts,
they put locks on their bedroom
and bathroom doors,
all steps designed to prevent other people
from entering what they consider their private realm
and knowing what it is that they don't want other people to know.
The very same Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google,
ordered his employees at Google
to cease speaking with the online
Internet magazine CNET
after CNET published an article
full of personal, private information
about Eric Schmidt,
which it obtained exclusively through Google searches
and using other Google products. (Laughter)
This same division can be seen
with the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg,
who in an infamous interview in 2010
pronounced that privacy is no longer
a "social norm."
Last year, Mark Zuckerberg and his new wife
purchased not only their own house
but also all four adjacent houses in Palo Alto
for a total of 30 million dollars
in order to ensure that they enjoyed a zone of privacy
that prevented other people from monitoring
what they do in their personal lives.
Over the last 16 months, as I've debated this issue around the world,
every single time somebody has said to me,
"I don't really worry about invasions of privacy
because I don't have anything to hide."
I always say the same thing to them.
I get out a pen, I write down my email address.
I say, "Here's my email address.
What I want you to do when you get home
is email me the passwords
to all of your email accounts,
not just the nice, respectable work one in your name,
but all of them,
because I want to be able to just troll through
what it is you're doing online,
read what I want to read and publish whatever I find interesting.
After all, if you're not a bad person,
if you're doing nothing wrong,
you should have nothing to hide."
Not a single person has taken me up on that offer.
I check and — (Applause)
I check that email account religiously all the time.
It's a very desolate place.
And there's a reason for that,
which is that we as human beings,
even those of us who in words
disclaim the importance of our own privacy,
instinctively understand
the profound importance of it.
It is true that as human beings, we're social animals,
which means we have a need for other people
to know what we're doing and saying and thinking,
which is why we voluntarily publish information about ourselves online.
But equally essential to what it means
to be a free and fulfilled human being
is to have a place that we can go
and be free of the judgmental eyes of other people.
There's a reason why we seek that out,
and our reason is that all of us —
not just terrorists and criminals, all of us —
have things to hide.
There are all sorts of things that we do and think
that we're willing to tell our physician
or our lawyer or our psychologist or our spouse
or our best friend that we would be mortified
for the rest of the world to learn.
We make judgments every single day
about the kinds of things that we say and think and do
that we're willing to have other people know,
and the kinds of things that we say and think and do
that we don't want anyone else to know about.
People can very easily in words claim
that they don't value their privacy,
but their actions negate the authenticity of that belief.
Now, there's a reason why privacy is so craved
universally and instinctively.
It isn't just a reflexive movement
like breathing air or drinking water.
The reason is that when we're in a state
where we can be monitored, where we can be watched,
our behavior changes dramatically.
The range of behavioral options that we consider
when we think we're being watched
severely reduce.