Is Privacy Entirely Gone?

Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

If you watch any movie from the 1940s in the film noir genre, you will see a recurring theme. Someone does something bad but runs away to another state. He might put on a disguise. People try to find him but cannot. He checks in and out of hotels under an assumed name. The heroic detective works to put together clues to connect the dots.

So on it goes in many variations of this theme, all of which turn on technological limitations. The police did not have the data. Communications technology was limited to phones attached to walls. There was no national database of anything, no permanent records except paper with fading ink in deep storage.

Nearly every drama turns on this point. A man courts a beautiful woman of noble lineage only to find out later that she is really a tramp on the make. A woman loves a man who she thinks is a fine gentleman only to discover later that he is an indebted rake. The priest is actually a mobster, a mobster is really a policeman, a shopkeeper is really a spy, and so on.

It’s all about information asymmetry. A vast gulf separates what is known by the players who are making decisions based on knowledge flows. Trickery is easy, deception is not easily discovered, duplicity is rewarded, and all-around sneakiness becomes the desiderata of social functioning. This dark plot line was especially compelling during and after World War II.

Watching this now, it’s impossible not to notice the difference between then and now. Almost everyone has a huge social media timeline that is open to the public. Artificial intelligence can figure out the most important details about anyone. What was once private is now entirely out in the open. What’s more remarkable still is that this new world without privacy was built entirely with public cooperation.

You watch old movies now and want to yell at the confused cop: Why not just take a look at the suspect’s social media trail? Of course, no such thing existed at the time. Now it does, which certainly makes law enforcement easier. That’s good. On the other hand, there is no longer much chance for anyone to maintain any privacy at all. That’s bad.

It’s much worse than that, as you know. Your every mouse click and phone scroll is recorded on databases that grow ever larger in size. These are sold and sold again, to other companies and also to governments. There is no limit on this. Your life has become your data, and your data belong to everyone. It’s the panopticon courtesy of technological innovation without guardrails.

Years ago, when email first came along, I intuited that there was nothing private about it ever. Anyone can forward anything to anyone. Storage allows something you sent a decade ago to resurface and be posted in public. Everything you say might as well be on a billboard on the interstate highway. This is just the nature of the medium.

Sadly, it took most people about 10 years to figure this out. What applies to email also applies to chats and groups. Screenshots enable anyone to share anything and everything you have ever said. Only recently have some options appeared that block screenshots, but I’m sure there is some way around that.

The world of yesteryear, the world of information asymmetry that formed the main plot device of novels and movies for centuries, is entirely gone.

The release of these Epstein files is a case in point. They reveal a terrible world of influence-peddling and grim debauchery. At the same time, many innocent people have likely been caught up in it. If you knew this guy and communicated with him at all, you are now under suspicion for having dark secrets, whether you do or not.

To be sure, much of the release of this information that implicates the overclass has been gathered by court discovery and the release then forced by an act of Congress. That said, it should serve as a reminder to everyone that what you do on your computer could potentially go public under the right circumstances. Anyone can be sued for anything, and if court discovery kicks in, nothing is private.

As a result, the release of these files is satisfying on the one hand but alarming on the other. Yes, we all want justice to come to bad actors, even if it comes in the form of a loss of reputation. On the other hand, innocent people who merely sent polite texts and emails are being dragged along too, creating all sorts of voyeuristic suspicions that are likely unjustified.

And yet perhaps this is a warning to everyone. Nothing you do on social media is private, obviously. But the same goes for emails, chats, texts, and even proprietary business communications. It’s also become obvious that our home devices and phones are always listening to our conversations. You should have it happen that you are talking about any subject with a friend only to have related ads hit your phone an hour later.

The only way to be truly private in conversation anymore is to be in person and without your smartphones. I hate being paranoid this way, much less forcing people to leave cellphones in the car if they are in my home or at dinner, but I fully understand why people do this. It’s not that we are hiding something; it’s simply that we don’t think the entire world should be listening to every passing word or typed message.

The deeper tragedy is the chilling effect. People self-censor, avoid controversial topics, or hesitate to associate with certain individuals lest old messages resurface. Innovation suffers when risk-averse cultures dominate. Free inquiry withers under perpetual surveillance. Trust erodes in institutions and in each other.

Reclaiming some privacy demands individual vigilance. As much as I would like to think legislation could help, I seriously doubt it. What we need is a culture-wide rejection of unchecked data extraction, stronger guardrails against commercial and state overreach, and decentralized technologies that prioritize user sovereignty over corporate control.

Until then, the old noir plots—where deception thrives on hidden truths—seem quaint. Today, the truth is everywhere, weaponized, inescapable, and often wielded against the wrong people. In this new reality, privacy isn’t entirely dead. It’s just increasingly expensive, inconvenient, and rare.

As frustrating as the old world of not knowing truly was, the new world of knowing everything about everybody has made us all nostalgic for the old movies. Our technological systems built to solve one big problem have created countless others of which we now know plus many more that will be revealed in the course of time.