Corporate IT Director / CIO at Grupo IAMSA

With over 30 years of experience in technology, Mauricio Amaro is the Corporate IT Director/CIO at Grupo IAMSA and a CIONET Mexico board member. He holds a Master's in Information Technology Management from Tecnologico de Monterrey. Mauricio is a recognized speaker and author and he has been honored with HITEC 50 and CIO100 awards for his collaborative knowledge generation and leadership.

Through this article, Mauricio Amaro explores the evolving concept of privacy in the digital age. He discusses how technological advancements and the massification of the internet challenge traditional notions of privacy, control and data security. Mauricio emphasizes the need to adapt our preconceived ideas and find new paradigms to balance control and openness, advocating for a proactive approach to managing personal information in an increasingly interconnected world.

We live in a moment when privacy is at a turning point. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, privacy is the state or condition of being alone, undisturbed or free from public attention as a matter of choice or right; seclusion.

As expected, academic definitions do not help much and it is necessary to delve into other speculations.

Not long ago, at some activist conferences, privacy was referred to as a matter of control. Although in this area, they mainly refer to the loss of confidentiality through facial recognition as a tool of control of one group over another to dominate it, giving a slight twist to the approach, it seems that privacy has much to do with control. Still, more than between rival groups, it is the control and decisions I must make about myself, about how, with whom and for what I reveal aspects of myself to a third party, at least until now.

Privacy, as a concept and as a practice, is evolving. It always has; we are only forced to change and notice it more.

Arthur Clarke and Stephen Baxter touch on this topic in part of their novel Light of Other Days, in which a new technology eliminates privacy and humanity must adapt to this. The concept of intimate or private disappears as we know it, but human activity continues, taking this turning point as an opportunity to evolve as a race.

  ​Privacy is evolving; we must adapt our preconceived notions and find new paradigms to balance control and openness in the digital world.  

It is similar to what is happening today with the massification of the internet and the avalanche of information caused by social networks. Currently, our activity is somehow captured and stored in the cloud and it is practically impossible to avoid it or put locks on it.

Our resistance to change makes us desperately seek to make our data invisible to those we do not want; however, contradictorily, we want them to be permanently available to us and our “allies.”

Why? So that they are not misused, we say. But… what do we understand by misuse?

Let’s return to activism and its focus on privacy, which is not about hiding information but about control.

Okay, that's a good point that gives food for thought. We want to control our information to be available to whoever we wish to or suits us at a particular time. So everything would be fine.

But, let’s put a case. I walk down a dark street and as usual (or should be), I don’t think I have any geolocation device activated for safety. However, suddenly, a criminal comes out, points a gun at me and asks me to go to an ATM to withdraw money and steal it. Do I have time to activate the geolocation? Or do I ask my aggressor for permission? Once activated, how do I send this signal to the police or someone who can help me?

So, we can consider having it always activated. Now, everyone, including the criminals (oh no!), can know where I am at every moment.

It’s a dead end.

We think we have decided to give an “AI” the decision to identify when I am in danger and give notice. This is perfect, but am I not delegating control to this technology? According to the definition of “privacy = control,” am I losing privacy?

We can also assume that if everyone always knows where I am, “the good ones” will always know and that will deter “the bad ones.” Thus, if we eliminate control (the premise of Clarke’s book), everything will balance itself out.

Anything can happen and we can imagine what we want; we will always have a blind spot that we cannot resolve because we are prejudiced in maintaining the concepts as we handle them today. We rarely open ourselves up to thinking about the future evolutionarily. Even when we believe we do, it is in a limited way. The only certainty is that changes, in this case technological, make us lose control of our information and the issue is knowing where this is moving and the new way to have power before deciding not to have it.

It is a complex issue, but my intention, beyond offering some magical answer, is to indicate the need to let go of the prejudice that we must maintain the concept of privacy as we have carried it until now and take a step forward in evolving our preconceived (or preconceived) ideas and find new paradigms for this.

Our data may still have to be private but in public.

The debate is open.