Privacy for Writers

Privacy is hard. It takes time. But what do you risk without taking privacy seriously?

Mark Zuckerberg famously said privacy is dead. Of course this is from a man who bought the houses next to him to tear them down for his own family's privacy.

Privacy is foundational for freedom but most authors (and everyone else to be fair) don't think about it until it's too late.

Your life - for sale

Every aspect of your daily life is being tracked, aggregated and sold to the highest bidder. Your insurance company, your pharmacy, your future employers, future dates. Anyone can access detailed information about you at the touch of a button and it's only going to get worse.

Librarians, too, are under attack, along side authors, professors and every day people who make our democracy run.

Authors and librarians are the foundations of a free society and yet they are increasingly under attack because people disagree with the books they share. Increasingly, these attacks are enabled by technology that enables global reach in an instant.

Yet many of the tech companies that enable this harassment are themselves not subject to the same surveillance through their refusal to use the technology they built. Why should the rest of us be subject to surveillance that many of the tech oligarchs refuse to be subject to themselves?

It's up to us as everyday people to fight back against the monetization and surveillance of our everyday lives. Because even if you don't think it's a big deal right now, tomorrow it might be. You could go viral from a single social media post. Or a reviewer could decide they REALLY don't like your book and decide to swat you (ie send police to your house under a fake crisis).