To me (a Canadian), there's been an implicit shift in the base expectation of privacy over the years — one might call this an "erosion of our un-formalized, but natural, right to privacy."
I don't think this is anything in the cultural zeitgeist. There's been no shift in the desire for privacy; the public hasn't become more concerned over time with snooping on their neighbours. We've just gradually had the privacy we wanted taken away. This is something the state has been doing to us, through the passage of law.
But, crucially, I also don't think that this has been the plan of any particular political party. "Eroding privacy" isn't on any party's platform; nor even is any benefit to which "eroding privacy" is the cost. This is not the effect of partisan politics. Privacy erosion has been happening just the same no matter who's been in charge.
Rather, I think what's been happening to privacy, has been happening almost by accident, by an inherent flaw in the "internal architecture" of our informal political institutions — not the executive/judiciary/etc, but the political parties, the "deep state", and so forth. This is what I think is happening:
• Politicians are in some ways "public figures" and have no privacy; but in other ways have already had their lives engineered systematically to ensure their privacy (coincidentally, in the name of national security) — down to being told what apps they can and can't install, using special secure phones, having meetings in special secure rooms, being driven around in the back of sound-proofed limousines, etc. Politicians have an entirely out-of-whack experience of "privacy" compared to anyone else, and so don't really understand that "privacy" is, for the average citizen, something maintained these days mostly by making market purchasing choices to use "privacy-preserving" technologies instead of "privacy-violating" ones; and that the existence of these privacy-preserving technology products/services are not enshrined in law, and can easily be annihilated by accident by bills that seek to do something else (e.g. protect children.)
• Along with this, those in the "deep state" that politicians speak to about technology and privacy issues, are themselves in the strange position of having been thoroughly picked over (security-cleared) as having absolutely nothing interesting about them that they would need to keep private. Departments entirely composed of such individuals, will have extremely skewed views on the need for privacy. (Thus why such departments elsewhere, had no internal revulsion to implementing e.g. PRISM — nobody in the room had anything to hide that PRISM would expose!)
• And also, the political parties, the "deep state", and any associated parts of government (e.g. an appointed judiciary) are all generally seniority-based systems. Which means that, inevitably, the people at the top who make most of the long-term decisions and "steer the ship" (not the Prime Minister, nor the MPs — but rather, party leaders, and the long-serving heads of departments working directly below cabinet ministers, etc) are all quite old. These "old hands" generally no longer attempt to keep up with the rapid pace of technological progress, and have fallen far-enough behind the curve that they have no sense for the current technological landscape having a major dividing axis of "privacy-violating" or "privacy-preserving" that a citizen might feel the need to care about. Instead, these "old hands" just feel a kind of Amish-like hesitance toward all technology — fear for what technology could do/enable. They hear reports from citizens about what some (usually privacy-violating) technologies have done; and rather than this moving them to opinions regarding privacy, this instead reinforces their beliefs about technology itself as being a modern boogeyman — with technology companies not serving the public good, and therefore technology-sector lobbyists and their pet issues being actively deprioritized vs other lobbies (esp in this case: the crime-reduction lobby.) Which means that these "old hands" are tuning out the words of Google and Meta (probably for the best!) but also tuning out the words of the EFF (very bad!)
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I'm sorry to say that I personally have no suggestions for what to do about any of these effects. They seem pretty inherent in the design of the informal institutions themselves.
We could perhaps formalize these institutions, such that they could be regulated? Reify "political parties" and "executive departments" as their own concepts in law, and legislate their leadership structure and selection processes, to prevent them from defaulting to seniority? But I feel like this would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater — there's a lot we gain by having short-serving elected politicians (who can say what the public wants these days), working together with long-serving public servants and appointees (who have seen all this before, and can keep long-term-project balls in the air.)
It seems somewhat obvious to me that even doing nothing, generational shift will help. Once the leaders of these institutions pass on, and are replaced by leaders who grew up in the current technological milieu, a concern for privacy might arise, with the government then seeking to backpedal on the erosion of privacy that has come before. This might take another 30 years, though. And although they'll then be conscious of privacy, something else — something that is only coming into the public consciousness as an issue today, and which likewise won't have an effect on the political class — will likely be left to erode in its place, due to those politicians having no foundational experience with it.
I don't think this is anything in the cultural zeitgeist. There's been no shift in the desire for privacy; the public hasn't become more concerned over time with snooping on their neighbours. We've just gradually had the privacy we wanted taken away. This is something the state has been doing to us, through the passage of law.
But, crucially, I also don't think that this has been the plan of any particular political party. "Eroding privacy" isn't on any party's platform; nor even is any benefit to which "eroding privacy" is the cost. This is not the effect of partisan politics. Privacy erosion has been happening just the same no matter who's been in charge.
Rather, I think what's been happening to privacy, has been happening almost by accident, by an inherent flaw in the "internal architecture" of our informal political institutions — not the executive/judiciary/etc, but the political parties, the "deep state", and so forth. This is what I think is happening:
• Politicians are in some ways "public figures" and have no privacy; but in other ways have already had their lives engineered systematically to ensure their privacy (coincidentally, in the name of national security) — down to being told what apps they can and can't install, using special secure phones, having meetings in special secure rooms, being driven around in the back of sound-proofed limousines, etc. Politicians have an entirely out-of-whack experience of "privacy" compared to anyone else, and so don't really understand that "privacy" is, for the average citizen, something maintained these days mostly by making market purchasing choices to use "privacy-preserving" technologies instead of "privacy-violating" ones; and that the existence of these privacy-preserving technology products/services are not enshrined in law, and can easily be annihilated by accident by bills that seek to do something else (e.g. protect children.)
• Along with this, those in the "deep state" that politicians speak to about technology and privacy issues, are themselves in the strange position of having been thoroughly picked over (security-cleared) as having absolutely nothing interesting about them that they would need to keep private. Departments entirely composed of such individuals, will have extremely skewed views on the need for privacy. (Thus why such departments elsewhere, had no internal revulsion to implementing e.g. PRISM — nobody in the room had anything to hide that PRISM would expose!)
• And also, the political parties, the "deep state", and any associated parts of government (e.g. an appointed judiciary) are all generally seniority-based systems. Which means that, inevitably, the people at the top who make most of the long-term decisions and "steer the ship" (not the Prime Minister, nor the MPs — but rather, party leaders, and the long-serving heads of departments working directly below cabinet ministers, etc) are all quite old. These "old hands" generally no longer attempt to keep up with the rapid pace of technological progress, and have fallen far-enough behind the curve that they have no sense for the current technological landscape having a major dividing axis of "privacy-violating" or "privacy-preserving" that a citizen might feel the need to care about. Instead, these "old hands" just feel a kind of Amish-like hesitance toward all technology — fear for what technology could do/enable. They hear reports from citizens about what some (usually privacy-violating) technologies have done; and rather than this moving them to opinions regarding privacy, this instead reinforces their beliefs about technology itself as being a modern boogeyman — with technology companies not serving the public good, and therefore technology-sector lobbyists and their pet issues being actively deprioritized vs other lobbies (esp in this case: the crime-reduction lobby.) Which means that these "old hands" are tuning out the words of Google and Meta (probably for the best!) but also tuning out the words of the EFF (very bad!)
---
I'm sorry to say that I personally have no suggestions for what to do about any of these effects. They seem pretty inherent in the design of the informal institutions themselves.
We could perhaps formalize these institutions, such that they could be regulated? Reify "political parties" and "executive departments" as their own concepts in law, and legislate their leadership structure and selection processes, to prevent them from defaulting to seniority? But I feel like this would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater — there's a lot we gain by having short-serving elected politicians (who can say what the public wants these days), working together with long-serving public servants and appointees (who have seen all this before, and can keep long-term-project balls in the air.)
It seems somewhat obvious to me that even doing nothing, generational shift will help. Once the leaders of these institutions pass on, and are replaced by leaders who grew up in the current technological milieu, a concern for privacy might arise, with the government then seeking to backpedal on the erosion of privacy that has come before. This might take another 30 years, though. And although they'll then be conscious of privacy, something else — something that is only coming into the public consciousness as an issue today, and which likewise won't have an effect on the political class — will likely be left to erode in its place, due to those politicians having no foundational experience with it.