Big Tech is Like the Stasi
Privacy is not a timeless natural right. As Sarah Igo describes in The Known Citizen, what is and isn’t private has expanded in some directions and contracted in others over the past century with no consistent underlying principle. Sexual behavior between consenting adults was legally public in the sense that it was criminally regulated well into the twentieth century. Medical records were routinely shared between physicians, employers, and insurers without patient consent. The expansion of legal privacy protection into both of these areas was the result of specific case-by-case struggles.
At the same time, financial transactions that were once private are now reported to governments under anti-money-laundering and tax-compliance measures, and communications that were once protected by the practical difficulty of interception are now trivially monitored at scale. These shifts also do not reflect a coherent theory of what should be private. They reflect the outcomes of contests between specific interests, and the interests of states and large corporations have generally prevailed over the interests of individuals.
The most thorough surveillance states in history were built without computers. The East German Ministry for State Security, known as the Stasi, surveilled roughly one in three of its own citizens through a combination of technical means and human informants, and used that information to control, suppress, and destroy people who had done nothing illegal. The surveillance economy that platforms have built differs in purpose and legal status, but not in its aims.
The Stasi employed roughly 90,000 full-time officers and had a network of approximately 180,000 informal informants in a country of 16 million people, a ratio of state surveillance capacity to population that has never been matched. Many of these informants were members of the same family who were recruited without each other’s knowledge. Anna Funder Stasiland documents what this meant in practice: files on personal relationships, sexual behavior, political opinions expressed in private, the contents of letters that were opened and resealed. The goal was not to prevent crime, but to map the population thoroughly enough to identify, isolate, and destroy anyone who might become a source of organized opposition.
Even in East Germany, state surveillance was constrained (at least in theory) by legislative oversight. Corporate data collection operates under a different framework, one built largely around consent obtained through contracts that no one reads and that cannot meaningfully be refused by people who want to participate in modern life. When a platform argues that its collection of behavioral data is voluntary and therefore not a privacy violation, it is making a legal argument, not a factual one. Treating these two cases as equivalent obscures how each works; treating them as separate ignores how governments now use corporate data collections to conduct surveillance they could not legally conduct directly.
People using social media and AI are revealing more about themselves than the Stasi could ever have dreamed of knowing. The irony is that the Stasi had to coerce their informants; we pay subscription fees for the privilege of being surveilled.
- Funder2011
- Anna Funder: Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. Harper Collins, 2011, 978-0062077325.
- Igo2020
- Sarah E. Igo: The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America. Harvard University Press, 2020, 978-0674244795.