The discussion about privacy in the internet is stuck with black and white arguments. Truth is we don't want our data to be private. We want it to be not-public, and we want it to be kept that way safely and reliably. Combining sensitive personal data not-publicly provides immense opportunities.

Imagine if we could combine the credit card purchasing information of every Finn with their health care records. With this dataset we would instantly know what are the detailed outcomes of different diets. We might be able to spot new cancer threats. Maybe we could include the actual healthcare costs to all the food prices.

Many these kinds of datasets would benefit the society greatly. Further, it is feasible to combine these pieces of information without revealing the identities of the people fully to the public. We are doing the same with reading behaviors at Scoopinion: no one knows how an individual reader reads stories, but after putting it together the data from the whole crowd, it helps every reader.

The discussion about privacy is very black and white. Either the data is private, or it is public. While it is true that after telling a secret to someone the information is not under the control of the teller, the situation with the digital data is not fully analogous with this example.

When encountering black and white terms, it is sometimes useful to quickly apply the Greimas square (aka semiotic square) to them. If we investigate the two words, private and public, we get

• s1: private
• s2: public
• -s1: not-private
• -s2: not-public

I mentioned that the situation with digital privacy is not analogous to keeping secrets. This is due to the fact that digital data is not-public instead of just plain old private.

When you expose your personal secrets, such as your browsing behavior, to someone you trust in the internet (Facebook, anyone?), they benefit from this information more than you. They are harvesting a resource and giving you a service for that. You risk loosing your secrets and your data is not accessible to your peers and seldom to you.

What if instead of demanding privacy to our data we would accept that it is not-public we want it to be, and demand that it should be accessible to us as well?

Further, we could do more to keep it not-public. What if we would have an architecture which has privacy by design, like Tor Project has, to hide the identities of those who submit their data, especially when mashing very personal health or financial data. (Hat tip to .)

There are so many great things we can achieve with the data we already have that I feel it is a shame we kling on the "loosing your privacy" discussion. Instead of this discussion we should seek for ways to implement solutions that keep our data not-public, safely and reliably.