Most of it was never private

Nobody should spy on your life is the sort of statement that feels unarguable until you try to work out what either half of it means.

Start with spying. When you loaded this page, a server somewhere recorded your address and your browser string and the time you arrived. If you’re reading it on a forum you have an account on, then there’s a complete public history of what you’ve read, what you’ve voted on and everything you’ve ever said, sitting on a page anybody can open. None of that took any effort to collect and none of it was hidden from you.

Now take an hour and read someone’s comment history. From a first page of comments you can usually work out roughly what they do for a living, what they think about testing, whether they’ve got a cat, how they feel about the way other people spend money. Read someone with twenty thousand comments and you could build a fairly complete picture of a person, their opinions and their circumstances, without any special access or any tooling.

So is the forum spying on you when it keeps that page up. Am I spying on you when I read it. I don’t think either of those is the right word and the reason is that you put the data there deliberately, in public, knowing it was public because that was the whole point of writing it.

That’s the uncomfortable part of most of these arguments. A lot of what gets called spying is data people handed over in the open and the objection isn’t really to the collection. It’s to somebody being good at reading it. The analytics package that watches what you do on half the sites you visit is a genuine problem worth arguing about and it isn’t quite spying either because you gave it away in exchange for the thing you wanted and the deal was written down somewhere you chose not to read.

The definitional problem runs the other way too. Your life is doing as much work in that sentence as spying is. The comment you posted under a handle you’ve used for a decade is somewhere between public speech and personal life and where exactly it sits depends on who’s asking and what they plan to do with it. There’s no clean line and the people arguing about it are usually drawing it in different places without saying so.

This isn’t an argument that surveillance is fine. It’s an argument that absolute statements about it fall apart on contact and that the ones that fall apart fastest are the ones that sound most obviously right. If you want to be able to object to the bad cases, you need a definition that doesn’t also catch a stranger reading your public posts carefully.

The practical version is simpler and less satisfying. Assume anything you put in public is being read by the most attentive person who could possibly be reading it because eventually it will be. That’s not a reason to stay quiet. It’s just the actual situation and it was the actual situation long before anyone built a tool to make it easier.

Where this gets genuinely difficult is aggregation, and that’s the argument worth having instead. Any one of those public things is trivial on its own and nobody would call it sensitive, but assembling ten years of them into a single profile produces something you never chose to publish, built entirely out of things you did choose to publish. The pieces were public and the picture wasn’t, and no rule about the pieces will ever catch it.

That’s the version of the objection that survives scrutiny. It just isn’t the one people reach for first.