Nikos Panaousis

Undigitized generations were sovereign individuals in that they owned their memories, utterances, and the information that left their minds, unless intentionally given away or intercepted.

From their memories, to their journal entries to their photographs and films to their correspondence, they were the ultimate arbiters of their knowledge and its dissemination. Today, our interconnected existence with technology has effectively deprived us of our ability to realize the level of privacy enjoyed by previous generations whose lives existed in analog formats rather than the cloud.

Before the internet, the destruction of information very often meant that it was irrevocably banished from the recorded world, remaining only part of humans’ dubious and fading memory. Today, our personal details, our secrets, travel trough fiber-optic cables across oceans and continents, often unencrypted, through infrastructure that doesn’t belong to the user, scattered across the globe, despite the user rarely changing geography.

Enter the cloud: When we choose to store our data in the cloud, we are very often giving up our rights to them, surrendering them to a company’s control. If our data, at some point in the future, are determined to have violated the company’s terms of service, the company reserves the right to ban the user from accessing that information, while also retaining a copy of everything the user once thought they owned.

Ultimately, the privacy of our data is determined by their interaction with third parties, which determines whether or not one truly owns their data and where that data travels.

To be digital is to be susceptible.