As the governments and corporations of the world continue to pressed to implement further regulations, rules, and restrictions to protect people from one another we will continue to experience more unintended consequences that hurt our personal liberty and freedom. Where those freedoms and personal liberty to do as we wish need to be restricted, such as prohibiting wanton acts of aggression and murder, preventing theft of goods and property, and restricting permanent harm to our neighbor, such restrictions are necessary. However, in far too many cases governments and corporations have grown so large that there may be no counter-balance to overreaches in such matters. Therefore, it is important to have a plan for both organizational privacy of individual’s information while simultaneously allowing for personal privacy from the organization.
In this article I will primarily focus on a few IT software tools that can be used to improve the security of personal communications between individuals as well as between organizations.
Encrypted Email Providers
There are a variety of email service providers today that give some level of encryption to the end user from the provider. I will not cover the features of each service here, but you have probably heard of several of them before; Proton Mail, Tutenota, Skiff, Hushmail, and the list grows each year. Why are such services growing in popularity and market share among individuals and businesses alike? The answer is quite simple, but perhaps not obvious to the average software user: the average individual has reason to be concerned about bad actors within the very organizations they have placed some level of trust in for a variety of technology products and services.
Encrypted email providers usually provide encryption of the body of the email at rest as well as in-transit. This means that although the provider has all of the technology infrastructure to manage sending, storing, and transmitting email messages to and from the user’s account, they cannot access any of the content of the user’s account. This differs from Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and other “free” services where the user IS the product. Many people have become aware of how dangerous this can be, especially as it concerns children or other vulnerable people who can quickly become victims of internal bad actors.
So who are internal bad actors at email providers? These are not the employees and third-party providers with whom the business contracts in nearly all cases. Bad actors are the external hackers, some of whom could be foreign state actors or corporate spies, who through some software vulnerability are able to gain access to internal platforms which are then exploited for personal or organizational gains at the expense of the end user. Sometimes the bad actors are corporate policies or attempts to “monetize” the user which have not protected every user from wrongdoing or exposure of vulnerabilities in leaking information publicly through such policies and money-making schemes.
Therefore, when considering how to best protect not only your personal, organizational, and end user email communications it is wise to consider email provider alternatives to whatever free or cheap email provider option is available. Protecting information is not just the cybersecurity expert’s job; everyone is responsible for cybersecurity, and making that work easier for employees, end users, and clients by using a provider that encrypts the data from itself helps everyone improve personal privacy.
Encrypted Chat & Text Messaging
One of the most ubiquitous uses of the Internet today is the ability to send short, asynchronous text-based messages to one another from anywhere in the world, and to receive, respond, and engage in a text-based message “chat” from any smartphone, laptop, tablet, or other personal computer. While this can be very valuable for many day-to-day activities, there are times where this ubiquitous, always-on nature of communications can compromise individual’s ability to speak freely and protest unjust actions by others.
The Arab Spring, the U.S. January 6th Capitol riot, and Hong Kong 2014 protests are just a few of the more prominent situations which have shown that governments, whether for good or for ill depending on one’s political persuasion, have used various surveillance tools to identify participants of such activities. Often, this has been through interception of text messages during such events, triangulation of user’s location, and then reconstruction of a user’s involvement in planning or carrying out acts which governments have deemed to be offenses against the state.
These situations are why many have turned to encrypted messaging applications such as WhatsApp, iMessages (to some degree), or Signal, and I believe it is why demand will continue to grow for bigger tools such as video conferencing software, multi-communication mode platforms, and cellphone service providers to encrypt more and more text messaging capabilities by default. Using tools with end-to-end encryption protects each individual’s ability to conduct free trade, movement, and relationship building without fear of reprisal from much larger organizations who might seek to do individuals harm. Yes, this can go both ways, and such tools can be used for evil purposes just as much as for good. But let us consider how often the very large organizations (governments, mega-corporations, and global non-profit organizations) which can easily engage in graft and corrupt practices with impunity are more likely to decry such end-to-end encryption than individuals who very often gain only their own personal autonomy and freedom from oppression when using such encrypted messaging tools.
As an IT business strategy then it would be wiser for long-term growth and sustainability of the business to promote end-to-end encrypted messaging to protect against overreach and oppression by competitors. Competitors may not be just local and industry-specific competitors either.
For instance, if a government wished to, let’s say, force the continuation of a war by increasing the money supply to afford ongoing war, and then suppressed anyone speaking out against the war, the easiest mechanism for suppression would be to scoop up anyone speaking out against the war by querying the databases of providers of unencrypted messaging tools. A business which would be hurt by the increasing money supply would be encouraged, therefore, to NOT speak out against the government’s actions, whether publicly OR privately in internal digital communications, if end-to-end encrypted messaging did not exist. No strategy to combat the government’s overreach might be able to be effectively crafted, and the business may cease to exist if the increased money supply harmed the business enough to force it to close it’s doors. This could certainly be true for small to medium sized growth businesses that relied on a global supply chain of both talent and resources where quick response to changing governmental conditions in one location might necessitate action by the business globally.
Money privacy
Last, but perhaps most importantly for growth businesses in 2023, the IT tools surrounding money management and government fiat might be the last frontier of personal communication privacy left to be tapped for improved profitability and sustainability. While money may not seem an obvious communication technology, let’s explore quickly how it is, and how privacy surrounding money can be so critical to every organization and person engaged in economic transactions today.
First, if we consider that the prices of goods, products, and services are the primary means by which we communicate the value of a thing, then it logically follows that money is the tool by which prices are communicated. We could attempt to denominate every good, product, and service by every other good, product, and service, but then we would have a many-to-many relationship of values which would be impossible to keep track of for the millions of things for which prices could exist. It is obviously much easier to track how many US dollars, Mexican pesos, or Bitcoin sats a thing is valued for, then how many cows, airplanes, or paper cups a used automobile is worth.
Second, because we can use money to communicate prices efficiently to others, there is a need to secure the structure of that money such that it isn’t in constant flux or impossibly complex to understand – it needs to be a clear communication tool, not a confusing one. This is what inflation does to money; inflation increases the complexity of conveying prices in the marketplace. When the communication of prices increases in complexity, it reduces personal freedom and privacy because reliance has to be given away to authorities (whether appointed or not) about prices of various goods, products, and services such that the individual person or business is required to rely on a larger entity for more and more things.
For instance, the cost of healthcare throughout Western countries is an enigma to most people in the year 2023. Certainly in the U.S. where we have a complex system of private and public health insurance intermediary payors, large and small healthcare provider systems, and a maze of government regulations it is impossible to fully determine the true cost in goods that it takes to produce a single drug pill, nor how much profit is gained by any one organization by producing that one pill. Reliance on the pricing of healthcare is therefore handed off by the actual consumer of healthcare to some larger organization who can negotiate in the aggregate of prices of providing goods, products, and services across a very large number of healthcare consumers. And so, the consumer hands off personal autonomy (and privacy) of making healthcare decisions to experts and authorities who may not have the same individual preferences and values of such healthcare decisions. If, however, inflation of healthcare costs did not exist because healthcare goods, products, and services prices did not fluctuate constantly, then healthcare consumers would be able to compare prices of these things consistently, and could accurately choose between health outcomes rather than relying on others to make decisions for them based primarily on prices.
So what about money privacy; how can we move towards better privacy of our money, and why should we? The first example that springs to mind is that large banking and investment institutions such as Chase, Citibank, and Bank of America in the U.S. have already begun surveilling customers and shutting down accounts of customers who do not fit into prescribed norms which protect the bank’s bigger backer – the Fed. Since the Federal Reserve provides the money liquidity that large banks rely on to create new money (for things such as mortgages, loans, and credit issuance), large banks are more reliant on the Fed than on their own customers for ongoing operational stability of their business. Therefore, bank’s incentives are aligned to appeasing federal government policies (even though the Fed is a quasi-government entity) more than they are aligned to providing banking services to their customers, notably the smallest customers: individuals and small businesses. Therefore, for better privacy, businesses and individuals should increasingly seek to diversify fiat banking activities across multiple fiat transaction facilities – banks, credit cards, credit unions, and non-financial transactional opportunities such as trade agreements or contractual non-monetary agreements – and investigate non-fiat alternatives. Bitcoin is really the only option for non-fiat financial transacting as a form of money, but that is a topic for another day.
One last note on money privacy: Bitcoin does not offer privacy per-se, but it does offer freedom from the pricing non-transparencies of the inflation-driven fiat currencies of current money systems. There are new opportunities to grow a business and a personal money flow system throughout the Bitcoin ecosystem, notably Podcasting 2.0, but learning more about how to do so requires a lot more reading, instruction, and understanding than can be accomplished in one article.
For more information about how Nandgate.Consulting can help you or your business improve on these topics in your own work and life, please contact us today.
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