Excellent points. Speaking at a church the other night, I told parents that a 2 hour family movie in the living room will always be better for kids than 20 minutes on a tablet watching YouTube kids. Passive (tv) consumption is also far less addictive than active (ipad) consumption too.
I don't understand for the life of me why we rush to give internet access to kids/teens with all we know about the dangers of these devices and the very real struggles many, many Christian men (and women) deal with. The internet isn't a playground and if we cared about our kids and their futures, we'd start making different choices as parents.
Thought provoking, like most of what I read here. As someone who has spent several decades as a consultant working with digital systems, I have been asked many times about privacy. My take on it is that digital privacy, like digital security, don't always reflect how we feel about those same things in the real world.
In the real world, the level of privacy we have is the result of a series of intentional choices in an effort to develop or protect something we value greatly, like our faith or our family. Far fewer people make choices about the digital world from the same perspective, assuming that the risks to those things we value are much less there. In reality, our online activity is like a digital confession archive, available to anyone who has the digital keys to the confessional. That has real world consequences.
From a biblical perspective, I think naiveite has always been one of the main ways that the devil uses to sneak sin into our lives. Learning and practicing biblical discernment has always been a powerful defense against the devil, particularly in this regard.
All Christians are always accountable to God who sees absolutely everything we do or even think. It is wonderful that we have no privacy from our Heavenly Father. Human accountability is fine but can prevent us from realising that we are accountable to God for the whole of our life not just the digital part. Many sins are sins of thought and we forget those at our peril.
My husband and I do not share our passwords, i don't see the need to, it is not going to stop anyone from sinning, besides asking for each other's passwords in my opinion makes it seems like you are controlling and paranoid.
Ultimately we are accountable to God who sees everything, we cannot hide from God.
I would never ask my husband for his password , nor would he ask for mine, we trust each other and have no need to snoop around on each other.
Ultimately nobody can stop another from using their devices to sin, spying or viewing somebody else's texts or whatever does not change the heart of the person sinning, it is just trying to CONTROL someone.
The only time i see the need for someone's password is they died or they committed a crime, which in that case the authorities would need it.
We need more privacy not less in this surveilance society. Sorry disagree very strongly
Very thought-provoking. I really appreciate the pushback against privacy of consumption, but I believe the underlying argument against individual privacy overstates the case. To quote technologist and security expert Bruce Schneier, "We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need." (https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2006/05/the_eternal_value_of.html)
He goes on to explain that this notion of privacy was the default for most of humanity's past, but technology is changing this: "Everyday conversation used to be ephemeral. Whether face-to-face or by phone, we could be reasonably sure that what we said disappeared as soon as we said it... This has changed. We now type our casual conversations. We chat in e-mail, with instant messages on our computer and SMS messages on our cellphones, and in comments on social networking Web sites... These conversations—with friends, lovers, colleagues, fellow employees—are not ephemeral; they leave their own electronic trails. We know this intellectually, but we haven’t truly internalized it. We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting that we’re being recorded." (https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/10/the_death_of_ep.html)
These are nice additional and nuanced thoughts, thanks for collecting the quotes. I think Samuel is not against privacy per se, but as you also say against privacy of consumption.
1.) I love the quote you've shared from your conversation with your browser:
"Most guys who do battle temptation to pornography are trying to wage that battle while making very little or zero changes to their overall consumption/tech habits. This is roughly comparable to a lothario trying to reform his ways but refusing to relocate from his apartment atop the brothel."
Our tech indeed use needs a holistic approach.
2.) I appreciate you addressing headphones. I actually "fast" from music and podcasts at the moment until Easter since I've noticed that my earphones often keep me from interacting and maybe even serving people around me. This is an area that is overlooked in my opinion. Look at almost any public place - a bus, café, gym etc. – so many people shut themself off from chance encounters and also private prayer and thoughts. So privacy for consumption is something that's most of the time quite dangerous and at least soul-sucking. When I was a teenager I often played games and used the internet privately in my room and looking back this might have felt comfy, but was also isolating. I wish I invested more in real-life friends, outdoor adventures etc., but my computer time was almost my default option.
Honesty with select friends is my route - if I am asking them to pray for me then I have to look them in the face! My wife had all my passwords when she was alive - married couples should surely always share such thing. And accountability partners should surely be close Christian friends with whom one shares all the ups and downs of life not just digital. Great piece as ever.
"I’m consistently amazed at how many online forums and advice columns I read where people acknowledge that their spouses do not know the passwords to their digital devices or social media accounts." - It can be quite tricky legally to give someone else unrestricted access to, say, a smartphone. Under GDPR regulations I can't allow my wife access to my phone because the apps on it contain information on others she's not permitted to see. In previous times a minister might have kept hand-written notes about pastoral visits, for example, in a notebook that others were not given access to, and that was perfectly reasonable and appropriate, but having most things now held digitially, with the smartphone as a portal to that world, poses problems.
"Technological change creates categories of privacy that become, as the technology advances, more and more untethered from the good."
Yes exactly. We live in an age where some children spend more time on screens than with their parents. As a result AdTech knows more about that child than their actual parents. But what if screen activity were as visible as the family room television? How would that change our consumption and our relationships? I've been thinking about this for awhile and I'm excited to be working on Gertrude to help with this exact problem. More on that here: https://chriswoolfe.substack.com/p/solving-deeper-problems
Excellent points. Speaking at a church the other night, I told parents that a 2 hour family movie in the living room will always be better for kids than 20 minutes on a tablet watching YouTube kids. Passive (tv) consumption is also far less addictive than active (ipad) consumption too.
I don't understand for the life of me why we rush to give internet access to kids/teens with all we know about the dangers of these devices and the very real struggles many, many Christian men (and women) deal with. The internet isn't a playground and if we cared about our kids and their futures, we'd start making different choices as parents.
Thought provoking, like most of what I read here. As someone who has spent several decades as a consultant working with digital systems, I have been asked many times about privacy. My take on it is that digital privacy, like digital security, don't always reflect how we feel about those same things in the real world.
In the real world, the level of privacy we have is the result of a series of intentional choices in an effort to develop or protect something we value greatly, like our faith or our family. Far fewer people make choices about the digital world from the same perspective, assuming that the risks to those things we value are much less there. In reality, our online activity is like a digital confession archive, available to anyone who has the digital keys to the confessional. That has real world consequences.
From a biblical perspective, I think naiveite has always been one of the main ways that the devil uses to sneak sin into our lives. Learning and practicing biblical discernment has always been a powerful defense against the devil, particularly in this regard.
All Christians are always accountable to God who sees absolutely everything we do or even think. It is wonderful that we have no privacy from our Heavenly Father. Human accountability is fine but can prevent us from realising that we are accountable to God for the whole of our life not just the digital part. Many sins are sins of thought and we forget those at our peril.
My husband and I do not share our passwords, i don't see the need to, it is not going to stop anyone from sinning, besides asking for each other's passwords in my opinion makes it seems like you are controlling and paranoid.
Ultimately we are accountable to God who sees everything, we cannot hide from God.
I would never ask my husband for his password , nor would he ask for mine, we trust each other and have no need to snoop around on each other.
Ultimately nobody can stop another from using their devices to sin, spying or viewing somebody else's texts or whatever does not change the heart of the person sinning, it is just trying to CONTROL someone.
The only time i see the need for someone's password is they died or they committed a crime, which in that case the authorities would need it.
We need more privacy not less in this surveilance society. Sorry disagree very strongly
Very thought-provoking. I really appreciate the pushback against privacy of consumption, but I believe the underlying argument against individual privacy overstates the case. To quote technologist and security expert Bruce Schneier, "We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need." (https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2006/05/the_eternal_value_of.html)
He goes on to explain that this notion of privacy was the default for most of humanity's past, but technology is changing this: "Everyday conversation used to be ephemeral. Whether face-to-face or by phone, we could be reasonably sure that what we said disappeared as soon as we said it... This has changed. We now type our casual conversations. We chat in e-mail, with instant messages on our computer and SMS messages on our cellphones, and in comments on social networking Web sites... These conversations—with friends, lovers, colleagues, fellow employees—are not ephemeral; they leave their own electronic trails. We know this intellectually, but we haven’t truly internalized it. We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting that we’re being recorded." (https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/10/the_death_of_ep.html)
AI is further eroding this: communications and storage technologies (phones, web browsers, cloud computing, cameras) have made it cheap to record enormous amounts of human activity, and now AI is making it cheap to analyze that. (https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2023/12/the-internet-enabled-mass-surveillance-ai-will-enable-mass-spying.html)
Viewed from this perspective, a healthy privacy can be a way of _pushing back_ against technology's encroachments, not furthering them.
These are nice additional and nuanced thoughts, thanks for collecting the quotes. I think Samuel is not against privacy per se, but as you also say against privacy of consumption.
1.) I love the quote you've shared from your conversation with your browser:
"Most guys who do battle temptation to pornography are trying to wage that battle while making very little or zero changes to their overall consumption/tech habits. This is roughly comparable to a lothario trying to reform his ways but refusing to relocate from his apartment atop the brothel."
Our tech indeed use needs a holistic approach.
2.) I appreciate you addressing headphones. I actually "fast" from music and podcasts at the moment until Easter since I've noticed that my earphones often keep me from interacting and maybe even serving people around me. This is an area that is overlooked in my opinion. Look at almost any public place - a bus, café, gym etc. – so many people shut themself off from chance encounters and also private prayer and thoughts. So privacy for consumption is something that's most of the time quite dangerous and at least soul-sucking. When I was a teenager I often played games and used the internet privately in my room and looking back this might have felt comfy, but was also isolating. I wish I invested more in real-life friends, outdoor adventures etc., but my computer time was almost my default option.
Honesty with select friends is my route - if I am asking them to pray for me then I have to look them in the face! My wife had all my passwords when she was alive - married couples should surely always share such thing. And accountability partners should surely be close Christian friends with whom one shares all the ups and downs of life not just digital. Great piece as ever.
This is so good. In a way it's a kind of a catechism of the world to train our hearts that the kind of privacy technology is good.
Please don't stop here. I want to know what are some of the practical steps one can take so that we can be counter cultural in our ideas of openness.
"I’m consistently amazed at how many online forums and advice columns I read where people acknowledge that their spouses do not know the passwords to their digital devices or social media accounts." - It can be quite tricky legally to give someone else unrestricted access to, say, a smartphone. Under GDPR regulations I can't allow my wife access to my phone because the apps on it contain information on others she's not permitted to see. In previous times a minister might have kept hand-written notes about pastoral visits, for example, in a notebook that others were not given access to, and that was perfectly reasonable and appropriate, but having most things now held digitially, with the smartphone as a portal to that world, poses problems.
"Technological change creates categories of privacy that become, as the technology advances, more and more untethered from the good."
Yes exactly. We live in an age where some children spend more time on screens than with their parents. As a result AdTech knows more about that child than their actual parents. But what if screen activity were as visible as the family room television? How would that change our consumption and our relationships? I've been thinking about this for awhile and I'm excited to be working on Gertrude to help with this exact problem. More on that here: https://chriswoolfe.substack.com/p/solving-deeper-problems