What We Used to Call Minding Your Own Business
Aug. 28/26
Privacy wasn't a setting when I was young. It was just the shape of things. A letter went in an envelope and the only people who read it were the ones it was addressed to. A phone call happened on a line that ran to your house and nowhere else. Nobody was collecting what you said and selling it to a stranger. You didn't have to opt out of anything, because there was nothing to opt out of.
I've been running the Proton suite for a few months now — Mail, VPN, Calendar, the password manager — and what strikes me isn't the technology so much as what it's standing in for. My father used to say a man's business was his own until he chose to share it, and that a fence wasn't about keeping people out so much as marking where your place ended and the next fellow's began. I think about that a lot now, because the internet doesn't come with fences. You have to build your own, and most people don't know they need to until something's already walked through.
Setting it up wasn't hard. Proton Mail replaced my regular inbox over a weekend, and the VPN just runs quietly in the background on the Mac Studio and the MacBook — one toggle, and then you forget about it, the way you forget the well pump is running until it stops. That's the test of a good tool, on the farm or off it: it disappears into the work. I don't think about the VPN any more than I thought about the irrigation lines once they were buried and doing their job.
What I can't get used to, still, is the idea that privacy is now something you maintain rather than something you simply have. There's upkeep to it — checking that the VPN connected before you're on a coffee shop's wifi, making sure the calendar isn't leaking your schedule to three different services you signed up for once and forgot about. It's not unlike keeping fence line. You don't fix it once. You walk it.
I don't say any of this as an alarm bell. I'm not convinced the sky is falling, and I'm suspicious of anyone who tells you it is while selling you the umbrella. But I notice things, and what I notice is that a whole generation is growing up assuming the opposite of what I assumed — that nothing is private unless you make it so. That's a different world to grow old in, and I don't know yet whether it's a worse one. Maybe it just asks something different of you.
This week's habit: check that your VPN is actually running on the devices you carry around, not just the one on your desk.
What did digital privacy mean to you before you had to think about it — and when did that change?
