They told us we had privacy.
Soft word.
Pillow word.
A word you whisper so people stop asking questions.
But privacy never protected us.
Privacy excused them.
Because while we were promised “your data is safe,”
they built mirrors behind the walls.
Cameras behind the glass.
Contracts behind the smile.
They called it privacy
while they logged, sold, inferred, predicted,
and profited.
They called it privacy
while the powerful kept something else entirely.
They kept secrets.
See, secrecy is different.
Secrecy has rules.
Secrecy has clearance.
Secrecy has audit logs and consequences and people who panic
when the wrong eyes see the wrong page.
Secrecy is respected
because secrecy protects power.
Privacy is tolerated
only until it gets inconvenient.
The Government doesn’t say
“please respect our privacy.”
They say:
TOP SECRET.
NEED TO KNOW.
UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS IS A CRIME.
And everyone listens.
But when it’s your body,
your health,
your mind,
your movements,
your history—
They say:
“Terms of service.”
They say:
“Trust us.”
They say:
“It’s anonymized.”
They say:
“Nothing to hide.”
Privacy was never real.
Not for us.
If privacy were real,
it wouldn’t disappear at the sight of money.
If privacy were real,
disabled bodies wouldn’t be databanks.
Poor neighborhoods wouldn’t be experiments.
Marginalized lives wouldn’t be “acceptable error margins.”
If privacy were real,
the same rules would apply to everyone.
They don’t.
So stop defending privacy.
Privacy is a stage trick.
What we need is symmetry.
What we need is to say:
If governments get secrecy,
so do people.
If corporations get secrecy,
so do communities.
If power fears exposure,
it doesn’t get to hide behind the word “private”
while demanding transparency from the rest of us.
Give me the right to mark my life:
CLASSIFIED – PERSONAL.
ACCESS REQUIRES CONSENT.
MISUSE CARRIES CONSEQUENCE.
Give me audit trails.
Give me revocation.
Give me visibility into who touched what
and why.
Not so I can hide forever—
but so I can choose.
Because here’s the truth they don’t want spoken:
Nothing is truly hidden.
Faces leak.
Patterns leak.
Systems predict.
Silence is already a risk.
So don’t sell me comfort.
Don’t sell me privacy.
Give me agency.
Give me secrecy where harm exists
and transparency where power lives.
Abolish the lie.
Not privacy.
The lie that privacy ever protected us.
And when everyone plays by the same rules—
when secrecy is no longer a privilege of power—
then, maybe then,
we’ll finally have something worth calling freedom.