ANDREW STERN: The modern internet is built on an implicit bargain. We get free access to websites, life changing apps, and connective social media. And in exchange, companies collect our data to sell to advertisers.

- Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy [BLEEP] we don't need.

- And back in 2010, an innocuous message board quote became internet famous. If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer. You're the product being sold.

- I think it's one of the worst functions of the way that the internet tends to work. And I think it's a myth that we've been bludgeoned into accepting.

- Every day, it looks more and more like that bargain has spiraled out of control, because it turns out that the services we got maybe weren't all they were cracked up to be.

- Facebook is accused of inciting a genocide in Myanmar.

WOMAN 1: Tiktok, Snap, and YouTube facing questions about how well they protect children.

- Instagram reportedly knew the app was fueling body image and other mental health issues.

ANDREW STERN: And the amount of data being collected on each of us was shocking. The specificity of that data is creepy. And companies and governments are using that data in ways we never imagined or really agreed to. But every time I talk about this topic with friends or family, without question someone says, I have nothing to hide so why should I really care? So that's what I'm going to explore because they absolutely should care a lot.

MAN 1: The best solution would be to dismantle these systems, smash them into bits, put them on a rocket, and launch them into the sun.

ANDREW STERN: This is Think Again with me, Andrew Stern, where I take you every step of the way as I dig into compelling, complex, or controversial topics that make us wonder, do we need to think again?

In a surprise to probably no one, one of my favorite nerdiest places to troll for stories is this Archive of Academic Studies and Papers . And one of the most downloaded papers in the site's history is this one. It was written by this guy, Daniel Solove. And it's called "I've got nothing to hide and other misunderstandings of privacy."

This particular paper was written all the way back in 2007 in the shadow of the Patriot Act. But Professor Solove's chief message was that the entire way we think about and understand privacy is wrong.

- Privacy is many things. They really don't turn on secrecy. They don't turn on information you want to hide. They're really about the use of your information, how information about you is gathered, compiled, what inferences are made from it, and, ultimately, what decisions are made about it.

- Professor Solove ran through a ton of examples for me. For instance, your finances aren't necessarily a deep, dark secret but you'd probably consider that information private. Same with your address and the names of your family members. Certainly not dark secrets but I'd imagine you'd probably want to control who has that information, same with your religious affiliation or maybe your medical history. But it goes beyond not wanting certain people, companies, or the government to have intimate information about you.

- It causes harm because this information could be used to make judgments about people. And it can be used to decide things that affect people's lives.

ANDREW STERN: You could be prevented from qualifying for an apartment or being able to buy a house or a car. You could miss out on your dream job because of your financial history. You could be preemptively fired for looking at another job opening. In states where abortion is criminalized, your search history and location data could potentially be used by prosecutors.

And it's not just the big companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon who have this kind of information on you. There are hundreds, literally hundreds of data brokers collecting, buying, and selling your most private data without your knowledge or consent. So to get a sense of what kind of information is out there on people, I requested a copy of everything one of the largest data brokers had on me. And then I called up my coworker Manny to tell him what they were able to dig up.

Hey, what's up, man?

- How's it going?

ANDREW STERN: We'll see very soon. I haven't opened this yet. You and I are going to react to it together live. So the report is 103 pages long.

- Oh my god.

- Oh wow. They have my address from when I was in college.

- Which was 40 years ago or something.

- That's harsh. It's savage. Savage. They have email addresses that go back to like high school. They know that my wife and I have had a kid. They know the gender of that child. They have like the last dollar amount purchased, which is accurate.

- You mean online?

- Yeah so like I bought like a like a four pack of Nike socks. And with tax, it came out to $17. And they've got that in this report.

- When did you buy them?

- Like middle of last week.

- Oh my god.

- OK. So they have based on their inferences what they think my body mass index is. They have here what my sleep quality is. So this is interesting. At the end of the report, they have a table for all of the data they have sold about me.

- I understood that advertisers are smart about who they present their products to. I didn't quite realize that they're combing through like every last bit of your personal life to get this information.

- So that wasn't as embarrassing as I would have thought. But it was also a lot more creepy than even I imagined. There was just so much data they had on me. But what comes next might be even more freaky because companies are starting to use algorithms and artificial intelligence to dissect all of that data, a lot of which is inaccurate by the way, which I saw in my report. And they make huge decisions about what we can and can't do in our own lives.

CHRIS GILLIARD: For many people, the assumption is that these mechanisms don't make mistakes. And that is very far from the truth.

- Chris Gilliard has been one of the foundational scholars on the privacy abuses of the internet, specifically how they impact already marginalized communities. And being the privacy expert that he is, he doesn't pose for photos or go on camera for interviews. He'd only do an audio interview with me.

There's this kind of concept of I've got nothing to hide. Why should I care? What is your response to that type of thinking?

CHRIS GILLIARD: My flippant response is, OK, take off all your clothes. Give me your keys and the passwords to all your devices. To kind of segue into the more reasoned response, it's not a question of whether or not you have anything to hide. It's more about whether you desire or not to share something.

- Professor Solove and Gilliard made almost this exact same point. Privacy is really about agency. Do you have the right and the ability to control who knows what about you?

CHRIS GILLIARD: The claim that you have nothing to hide comes from a very privileged position.

- By that, he means that people who typically say this, and this has been true in my anecdotal evidence too, are usually white folks who the system tends to take care of. But for folks of color, these systems historically do not.

CHRIS GILLIARD: The notion that people are only going to be targeted for things they've done wrong or they're going to be fairly targeted or accurately targeted-- historically, none of those things are true or at least there are populations for whom that is not true.

- Do you see a difference in state-based versus private companies in terms of who is collecting, buying, selling, or assimilating this kind of privacy data?

CHRIS GILLIARD: I think there's very few meaningful distinctions because even in the case of what law enforcement can't get or would say require a warrant to get, often they can just ask or buy that from particular companies.

ANDREW STERN: For example, a report came out in May showing that ICE is buying tons of information from data brokers to create a massive surveillance system it can point at almost anyone in the country with basically no oversight. And it's not just data brokers. All sorts of powerful companies and government agencies are buying and using data in ways we didn't agree to or really envision.

And one of the harshest examples comes in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned. Chris and I did our initial interview before the landmark Supreme Court ruling. And there are now huge implications for women and their partners now that abortion will not only be prohibited in a lot of states but it'll be criminalized in a lot of states, too. So I called Chris back to ask about that specifically.

How do you see either law enforcement agencies or private antiabortion groups using digital data?

CHRIS GILLIARD: I'm trying not to be hyperbolic when I say this, but there are almost no limits. The amount of tracking on almost any website that you go to, it means that almost nothing that we do is in any way sort of privileged, or secret, or anonymous, or anything like that.

- Chris said that's true even if you follow the guides organizations have published on how to pursue an abortion secretly, like buying a burner phone to search for resources.

CHRIS GILLIARD: There is no meaningful and significant way that the average person can avoid this. When I say average person, I mean I can't do it. You know, you'd have to be really highly knowledgeable, very technically skilled, and extremely careful.

- And that brings us back to the original question about why you should care about your data and your privacy even if you feel like you have nothing to hide because that's not what privacy means. It's about having agency and ownership about what information is gathered and shared about you and how that information is used. But at the heart of all of this I think is even a larger philosophical question that gets at what it means to be an American.

CHRIS GILLIARD: Public obscurity and the ability to move about society kind of unbothered is a foundational bedrock in which a free and democratic society exists.

- In this country, we're presumed innocent. We don't have to justify ourselves to the government. I don't have to constantly be looking over my shoulder, wondering what some government bureaucrat is likely to think about what I'm doing. That's the whole point of privacy. It's none of your business.

- We're supposed to be able to go about our daily lives in obscurity if we want to. But to meaningfully participate in modern life, we're forced to give up that foundational American right, or at least we do based on how the economy of the internet is currently constructed anyway.

CHRIS GILLIARD: My firm and fundamental belief is that many of these systems should not exist.

- They've got my religion ethnicity code as middle eastern Arab, which I am neither of those things.

- I think they saw the beard maybe.

- It's a fair point.

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